We are about halfway through our book that so far must have enlightened you with a fascinating paradigm shift in business model, business processes, new delivery and deployment platform, whole new tools and technologies for collaboration, and applications to transform your business and to help you create business agility. In this chapter, we touch upon mobility, mobile devices management (MDM), and mobile applications management (MAM) in greater detail.
Gone are the days when mobile phones were used for telephonic conversation alone. Now we check our smart devices for e-mails, text messages, and various applications such as searching for any web content, music, video, and many business applications. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are carrying a smart computer in our pocket all the time to provide us the agility we need in a dynamic and ever-changing business environment. Our lifestyle has changed dramatically in the past few years, and we are getting accustomed to using these smart devices for everything, including business transactions, communication, entertainment, shopping, and leisure.
In the past decade, we have witnessed a smart revolution in the mobile space. The number of mobile devices has increased fivefold from one billion to five billion, with an astonishing increase in the number of connected people from 400 million to over two billion. This unprecedented growth of connectivity has created an overwhelming range of new possibilities that include communication, collaboration, socializing, and performing e-business transactions. Mobility and mobile smart devices have changed people's lifestyles, work patterns, and ways of doing business. Mobile technologies have revolutionized the way in which we work today. Mobility provides two crucial advantages to organizations: location independence and personalization. The past decade has seen the rapid development of the Internet, the advent of cloud computing, and the lowering of costs of both mobile hardware and services. As a result, mobile technology has become a viable and some would say essential way of conducting business. Hugely successful organizations such as Apple Computer have been able to fundamentally alter the user experience, forcing other organizations to change the way they conduct business, interact with key constituents, and collaborate with one other.
The adoption of smart devices has accelerated at a rapid rate, and businesses have relied on mobile devices for their hyperconnected employees for driving business agility. Calls, messages, teleconferencing and videoconferencing, e-mail, music, camera, and access to a corporate network are common utilities to talk about at least. The list of applications on these smart devices has grown considerably, solving some common problems like flashlights, working as remote devices, card swipe for payment authentication (Square), navigation, and many more. The recent acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook for a whopping $19 billion has forced many telecom service providers to guess about the next transformation and convergence of many services.
Consumer electronics (CE) devices, once driven by their ability to provide specific functions, like music playback, video, or voice communications, are increasingly providing multiple functions and Internet connectivity for information, communications, and entertainment. This is resulting in the overlap of features and functions between product categories not only in the mobile segment, but also in other CE devices like digital televisions and set-top boxes. As a result, this entire category is morphing into a larger category often referred to as smart devices. There are three leading platforms in the mobile segment: smartphones, tablets, and notebook PCs. In-Stat (www.in-stat.com) research forecasts that this category of mobile “magnet platforms” will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.7 percent through 2015, compared to 8.7 percent for the overall mobile market.
“The technology driver of all these smart devices is the mobile technology, because it represents the largest and fastest-growing segment of the entire electronics market,” says Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist. “Even in PCs, where increasing performance was once the mantra, CPU vendors are now focused on the performance efficiency of mobile computing and using the resulting products to drive advancements in other forms of computing, including desktop PCs, servers, and embedded applications. The innovation of the mobile market is being driven by four key factors: richer content, network access for communications and content, increased bandwidth to enable this access, and new technologies.”
We have focused on mobile technologies as a means of creating and improving existing business, enabling digital business, and driving business agility. The past decade has witnessed the disruptive innovation and business model in the area of cloud, social, mobility, big data, and power of collaboration as discussed in Chapter 5. Mobile technologies with handheld capabilities are unique, as they provide personalization, location, and time independence. Apple Computer has disrupted the mobile market by combining voice and data communication, digital photos and video films, entertainment, and gaming all together with ease of use and a rich user experience. As a result, mobility can drive agility in businesses with unlimited potential. Mobile technologies and smart devices are influencing our social, cultural, and business patterns.
“Mobile is not just about conveniently selling on a mobile device; it's about giving customers all the information they need while they're in the store, and making it a better experience,” says Jon Kubo, CIO of Wet Seal. “One of the trends we're seeing is retailers looking to put tools in the hands of customers that basically empower them. Customers want to be empowered in their shopping experience.”
Bhuvan Unhelkar, national director at the Australian Institute of Business Analysis, defines mobile business (m-business) as evolution of both internal and external business practices through the adoption of suitable mobile technologies and processes, resulting in a mobile enterprise. He argues that m-businesses primarily want to engage with customers and business partners in location-independent and time-independent manners. This allows them to provide customers with new and valuable services and products. Moreover, m-businesses also want to exploit the location and time independence of mobility to improve internal business processes. Because of the dynamic and instantaneous nature of mobile technologies, m-businesses can be in close and even constant contact with customers, partners, other external partners, and internal stakeholders.
In the fall of 2011, Oracle commissioned a survey to look at consumers' perceptions of their experience when they shop across different retail channels. This online study, conducted by an independent service, polled 2,169 U.S. and Canadian consumers aged 18 years and older. It analyzed their use of channels including computers, mobile devices, brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, and customer service representatives to gain more information about a product or to complete the purchase of a product or service. The survey also gathered data about consumers' experiences with these channels, as well as how they are incorporating social media into their online commerce activities.
According to the report, mobile commerce is a vital link between channels, especially for consumers 18 to 34 years old. Twenty-seven percent of consumers who own smartphones use them to browse or research products more than once a week, up from 13 percent of consumers in 2009. Because smartphones are capable of doing things such as completing in-store and online purchases, special offers, and notifying retailers when the customer enters a store, they are poised to serve as a common platform for the cross-channel experience.
Consumers age 18 to 35 are moving faster than others to use their smartphones to pay in stores and online. Retailers and mobile service providers first must assure consumers that the mobile phone is safe to use as a payment device.
As security measures improve, however, adoption will soar. Wholesalers and retailers should move aggressively to understand unique opportunities to connect with customers via their mobile phones and create a more seamless and personalized cross-channel experience. The following are the results when consumers were asked whether they use their mobile phones to complete purchases in a store, and how secure they believe the mobile device to be:
Increasingly, the mobile web is a primary touch point for individuals to interact with an organization and find information on products and services.
We discussed the concept of a business ecosystem in Chapter 1 that provides a model for sustainable competitive advantage via a collaborative commerce synergy to develop and execute a customer experience management strategy enabled by social business technology to drive a customer-centric value chain. Mobility with smart devices renders pervasive access of content, and information strengthens the business ecosystem and offers enhanced agility. Customers, employees, and business partners of any organization can reap significant benefits with the help of mobility and smart devices.
Let us examine some use cases that businesses can leverage by deploying mobility across the enterprise.
Mobility and mobile technologies have empowered the workforce on the move such as sales, service, shop floor, retail outlets, hospitality, health care, banking, travel, and many more. It is a common sight to find sales or service persons irrespective of industries walking with smart devices such as tablet PCs or iPads to demo their products or services with their customers or simply to capture some facts and obtain authorization for carrying out some services.
Mobility has provided access to powerful systems such as customer relationship management (CRM), enabling salespeople to perform their jobs more effectively than before and helping them to talk to their customers with all resources at hand at all times remotely in front of their customers. With the help of smart devices, the sales team is getting smarter and more efficient, whether they have to deal with the marketing cycle (prospecting, cold calling with customer intelligence, lead generation, e-mail marketing) or handle requests for proposals (RFPs), proposal submission, or customer presentations and demonstrations. They are now able to carry out all of these tasks simply on smart devices with all resources available to them delivered via the cloud infrastructure, discussed in Chapter 3.
Most of the leading enterprise CRM systems, such as Oracle Sales and Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.com CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, and SAP CRM, are offered on the cloud infrastructure and are accessible on smart devices, making sales teams smarter and more efficient to help them achieve their sales quotas. Mobility has not only helped sales teams get smarter; it has also helped customers to get the right solutions for their business needs, cutting the sales cycle drastically.
Mobility has also helped service personnel to serve their customers proactively with the help of smart devices and iPads, accessing their systems of records and guiding them with facts and figures at hand. Integrated CRM systems with service deployed on the cloud assists them with scheduling warranty and routine services and helps them with greater intelligence about previous history on breakdown and maintenance service. For example, if we take our car in for scheduled maintenance service, a service adviser of a reputed car manufacturer comes with an iPad to pull the details of the car history and its maintenance record. Based on inputs, the service adviser records tests and diagnostics to be carried out and takes our signature for parts and labor for the maintenance service. Isn't it a neat, smooth, and pleasant experience that we get these days thanks to mobility and smart devices?
Smart devices have improved accessibility and communication among ecosystems. Customers, employees, and partners can access information in different ways and access different information altogether. Mobility has offered more availability to ecosystem users. For example, an airline passenger can access flight times while being driven to the airport in a taxi without actually calling the airline. It is common to print the boarding pass with a bar code on smart devices and pass through security check-ins at the airport. Similarly, accessibility to sports scores, medical information, and other types of information is increasing every day. Rapid growth and availability of hotspots is enabling connectivity around airports, hotels, restaurants, schools, and universities, providing greater agility in information access, consumption, and execution of significant tasks.
Smart devices also offer location presence, enabling marketers to target and communicate about their products and services in real time specific to the location. For example, if we go to any mall and check in to services offered by Foursquare or Google Places, all subscribers to these services will know about our presence in the mall. Merchants in the mall may target us with their products and services promotion by sending brief alert messages while we are in the mall. This has opened up a new targeted communication in the field of marketing and advertising. It helps merchants to target customers walking near their stores and also helps customers to get good bargains of products and services.
The current smart devices (such as iPhone and Samsung) are powerful with all their built-in gadgets such as cameras, sound recording, and access to all apps, including social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Viber, and many others that enable crowdsourcing). Many breaking news stories these days come first via Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn updates with the help of smart devices capturing photo or video on the site of occurrence. Active journalists also refer to Twitter pool or crowdsourced news for credibility and authenticity.
Government agencies are seeking public help to curb crime and report incidents with the help of smart devices, uploading photos or videos of a crime at the scene. Neighborhood watch is a great initiative to monitor. Nextdoor is great example of portal services where we can update, report, or upload any findings in the neighborhood that are observed by residents, and counsel authorities. Smart devices are enabling us with smart walk, capturing any issues with roads, pathways, streetlights, or abnormal activities and behavior, and report them live instantly.
Mobile networks and smart devices combined with social networking, cloud technology platforms, and big data analytics have laid a strong foundation for patients to receive health care not only in hospitals and clinics but also in the communities where they live. Mobility is becoming a core attribute of patients, practitioners, providers, and payers, helping them to work together toward greater access of health care services and better outcomes. One of the most visible patient empowerments is at the intersection of mobile and social networking. Patients are now actively participating in health-related discussions in online community forums and blogs, often using smart devices. Patientslikeme.com, one of many community portals, has more than 150,000 users who share and discuss conditions, symptoms, and treatment information on over 1,000 health issues.
More interestingly, patients have started using smart mobility for their fitness and wellness. The list of social and mobile fitness apps is long and growing every day. Some examples are Nike FuelBand and Abvio RunMeter, Walkmeter, and Cyclemeter, all mobile based and with GPS capabilities. Monitoring of chronic diseases by these devices is another great application that is growing significantly. For example, patients are able to enter blood sugar information by Internet and mobile devices, and their care provider is then able to provide coaching and corrective care.
More advanced capabilities such as blood pressure cuffs are being connected directly to smart devices for measuring blood pressure and transmitting the readings to care providers in case of any anomalies.
In order to provide a robust enterprise-class development platform for developers, Oracle recently introduced a mobile enterprise application platform comprised of Oracle ADF Mobile, Oracle Berkeley DB, and Oracle Lite Mobile. ADF Mobile and JDeveloper enable application developers to rapidly extend enterprise applications to mobile devices. These mobile applications use Berkeley DB for reliable device/local data management. The Oracle Lite Mobile server runs on the Web Logic server in the middle tier and provides connectivity between the Oracle Database server applications and mobile devices. This allows for automatic and bidirectional synchronization with the data center, as well as robust remote management of devices.
New applications are getting built and developed, which are keeping mobility in mind that can be extended across mobile platforms and devices. Oracle's next-generation Fusion suite of applications is built with that vision with the Application Development Framework (ADF) Mobile and offers cross-platform, rich on-device mobile capabilities with tight device services integration, and a mobile-optimized user interface. ADF-based applications enable enterprises across industries to meet frequently changing mobile requirements by allowing developers to rapidly and visually develop applications once, and then deploy them to multiple devices and channels.
Fusion Tap is a collection of mobility application modules that work across the Oracle Fusion Applications suite to provide mobile workers the ability to be productive anywhere and anytime. By taking an information-driven approach to mobility, Oracle Fusion Tap enables mobile workers to know what they need to do through a common exception-based work list, what they need to know through embedded analytics, and whom they need to connect with for immediate resolution.
Fusion Mobile Sales drives further sales team productivity by enabling direct access of Oracle Fusion CRM within iPhone and BlackBerry, and allowing instant access and team sharing of important customer, contact, and opportunity details within smartphones. Through mobile technologies, employees can spend more efficient time with customers. Employees are now able to access enterprise applications, such as customer relationship management (CRM), self-service, and many other applications on their smart devices remotely from anywhere. Employees can gain a better understanding of their internal inventories and respond immediately to changing customer demands. Mobile customer relationship management (M-CRM) must create close relationships with customers by providing value. Customers want reliable and fast service, and CRM provides those services to enable the business to gain more customers. The CRM is crucial in a mobile business, as it is the system that provides the business with the ability to directly contact the customers and users. Furthermore, personalization of the customer's interaction is extremely valuable in M-CRM. The combination of technology, software, people, and reengineered business processes converges to provide value through CRMs.
Enterprise mobile platforms are becoming increasingly vital for businesses. With wider use of smart devices, large enterprises are forced to formulate plans and strategies to encourage a bring your own device (BYOD) policy by employees. When employees are encouraged to bring their devices to the enterprise, they need to have access to corporate applications and data. That may pose a challenge for businesses to provide secure access to data and applications with identity and access validation. An enterprise mobility platform must deal with mobile device management (MDM) as well as mobile applications management (MAM).
Major technology vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard (HP), and SAP have formulated comprehensive strategies to offer enterprise mobile solutions and introduced their robust mobility platforms. Oracle recently acquired Bitzer Mobile while IBM snapped up Fiberlink to strengthen its BYOD security offerings (http://investorplace.com/2013/11/oracle-buys-bitzer-mobile-bring-device-bid/#.UqnVp_QW0lo).
Oracle's mobile platform is robust and comprehensive to help developers build cross-platform, multichannel, and multidevice applications. It helps in integrating data and services across the enterprise and mobile devices. It leverages their identity and access authentication services to provide secure information uniformly across all layers of enterprise and mobile applications. Most important, the platform enables deployment and management on the cloud as well as on the premises for multidelivery. With the Bitzer acquisition, the platform adds BYOD security capabilities, enabling employees to bring their own devices, and, with single sign-on (SSO), they get access to all enterprise applications segregated from their personal applications on their devices.
Companies are changing how they conduct business due to the growing demands for mobility and access to business applications. As the corporate enterprise network evolves into a wireless-centric, cloud-based, mobility-applications-driven environment, mobile solution providers have developed a comprehensive suite of products and services that address this market known as mobile device management (MDM). Such solutions enable enterprises to:
It is very important for businesses to consider each of the following factors before deploying mobile platforms across their enterprises:
Mobility has increased real-time collaboration (discussed in Chapter 5) and improved accessibility and communication among the employees, customers, and partners ecosystem. Oracle Social Network addresses the collaboration gap through stream-based conversations that are designed to capture information from people, enterprise applications, and business processes to facilitate collaboration between individual users and teams of people both within and across enterprises. As a system of engagement, individuals can collaborate, network, drive decisions, and update data, both in the focused pursuit of business objectives as well as in the serendipitous discovery of information and expertise.
Mobility can enhance knowledge management (KM) within an organization by making it more robust, accurate, reliable, and accessible. Mobile technology is a rapidly expanding part of everything we do, from how we reach customers to how we access information to how we collaborate with colleagues. End users can update key documents or add new ones anywhere and at any time.
Use of smart devices offers great benefits, but it may also pose severe threats to businesses if not protected with security measures and strict policies. In businesses today, smart devices are commonly used for corporate e-mails, documents, and many times for accessing corporate applications via VPN access. These devices also provide access to corporate contacts databases and repositories of information, and sometimes valuable financial information systems. In these cases, the confidentiality of sensitive business data must be secured and protected. These devices when logged to corporate systems may become vulnerable to unauthorized access by other users. For example, corporate e-mails, contacts databases, and financial information should not be available to unauthorized users, and these devices should be protected from such vulnerability.
It has been common practice for companies to protect their servers, workstations, and other IT systems and services, and protecting and securing smart devices should also be taken to the most important level. There are some obvious threats against which smart devices must be protected. The most common is loss or theft that could result in corporate data leakage. Another threat is unauthorized use of these smart devices that may lead to corporate data misuse. The third threat is malware specifically designed for these devices.
Identity is at the center of the Force 5 Tornado technologies that are reshaping the enterprise. To reiterate, Gartner has observed that these are forces that are fundamentally changing business. Collaboration has become mainstream with organizations now using social platforms to communicate not only with customers, but internally among employees and with machines as well. Employees everywhere are accessing business applications and data through mobile devices. Information is evolving in tandem, moving beyond a single system, and SaaS applications continue to be widely accessed and adopted.
Digital businesses must now employ identity as a crucial component in managing and securing the changes brought by social, mobile, information, and the cloud. These forces are pushing data and access beyond the firewall, requiring the enterprise to address the resulting security and management issues. Legacy identity and access management (IAM) software is no longer a practical solution for an IT that must deal with cloud applications and remote employees accessing these apps on mobile devices.
Virtual enterprises need identity solutions that are built to manage an environment that extends beyond the traditional network of firewalls. Cloud-based IAM brings visibility to digital businesses internally and control of the shared IT environment throughout their various virtual enterprise partnerships that may span multiple business ecosystems. It is a business management solution that addresses the new identity and security issues in the changed world of enterprise IT. Furthermore, cloud-enabled IAM is scalable and nimble so that a digital business may respond to the adaptive dynamics of diverse identity scenarios.
Business is changing, and the enterprise needs a cloud IAM solution that's up to the task. As enterprises keep moving to the cloud, and as their employees continue going mobile, it just makes sense to solve identity issues from the cloud. IAM is a fundamental element of cloud IaaS for the competitive social and mobile virtual enterprises.
Gartner envisions that half of all enterprises will mandate employee BYOD policies by 2017, introducing potential threats such as:
Gartner further predicts that by 2020, about 70 percent of enterprises will use attribute-based access control (ABAC) as the primary mechanism to protect critical data assets, up from below 5 percent in 2014. There are several technology solutions in the market to ensure safety against these threats, and enterprises need to use careful evaluation and deployment.
An example of this data protection and security technology innovation comes from WidePoint Corporation for a new cloud-based identity-as-a-service (IDaaS) offering. According to WidePoint this service assigns digital certificates to mobile devices for protection of shared data as well as better managing access by laptops, tablets, and smartphones for access to corporate data.
The WidePoint offering leverages cloud-mobile convergence, and may provide big data protection. The IDaaS Certificate-on-Chip service enables:
WidePoint CTO Daniel Turissini explained, “Our expertise in building out a federally authorized credentialing infrastructure to a base of over three million users has uniquely qualified us to develop and bring to market a cost-effective, scalable, and easily deployed service that addresses the problems that organizations are presently facing as they extend their IT infrastructures into the cloud.” WidePoint CEO and chairman Steven L. Komar added, “With our long and proven history of expertise in communications life cycle management and identity assurance solutions, WidePoint is uniquely attuned to providing higher-level security as part of its portfolio of managed mobility solutions offerings to commercial and government markets. The IDaaS Certificate-on-Chip service provides customers with additional security in a manner that not only can increase worker productivity, but is also complementary to the organization's unique security policies and related compliance requirements.”
Additionally, IDaaS data protection and security technology with ABAC may be the solution to the hybrid cloud multi-tenancy security challenges of big data. This approach involves the use of so-called data lakes as data storage architecture. Peter Guerra, principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, explained, “We have built a series of big data platforms that enable clients to inject any type of data and to secure access to individual elements of data inside the platform. We call that architecture the data lake.”
The difference between a traditional data warehouse and the emergent data lake reflects the issues for the system of record (SOR) transformation into the system of engagement (SOE). As a result, the rigid pre-analytical processing data structures of the warehouse are replaced by the fluid metadata tagging of the big data streams being collected and stored as they flow into the lake. The IDaaS-ABAC approach can be applied to securing discrete data elements or the whole lake, depending on security needs and performance considerations.
Jon Stevenson is CEO of Mobotory, a young high-tech start-up. It is fast growing as a digital business by leveraging relationships with key partners and has formed virtual enterprises with a global reach. This business agility strategy has enabled Mobotory to become a valued member of several business ecosystems in diverse industries around the world.
Mobotory creates mobile enterprise solutions for management of large-scale events that utilize the convergence of the Force 5 Tornado technologies to disrupt its target event market spaces. It is based on a modular architecture with a core app engine that integrates safety, security, operations, engineering, production, and broadcast television logistics management applications.
This is his creating business agility story.
In the next chapter, we will elaborate further on the convergence of these Force 5 Tornado technologies and of social media in particular that is enabling digital businesses in many ways by listening to the voices of all the various stakeholders (customers, partners, employees, and independent consultants) in their business ecosystem.
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