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Volume 2, Issue 8
Thanks for making Aeroprise #1! Aeroprise Mobile Gateway Voted "Product of the Year" by Customers at Annual Remedy User Group Conference Ask The Experts: Q&A With DEMOmobile Founder Chris Shipley This month we begin the first in a series of interviews with thought leaders in the mobile industry. Think of us as the Suzanne Somers of the mobile world: in just five short minutes each month we'll boost your wireless fitness level...one insight at a time. This month we sat down with Chris Shipley, producer of the well-known DEMOmobile Conference and Co-Founder and Editorial Director of GuideWire Group LLC. AP: How is the mobility software market evolving?
CS: For individuals using personal devices and enterprise users, mobility has moved from being an "add-on piece" to being a part of the toolkit every business needs. Part of this change is the realization that decision flow needs to be ubiquitous. AP: Mobile technology has certainly come a long way... CS: Five years back, prospective users of mobile software were bifurcated into two types - executives and field workers. Both these user bases had to come back to the office and sync up information. Well, that does not really improve productivity. Today, more than 50% of enterprise workers are mobile all or most of the time. The need for remote access to applications is greater than ever. We've come a long way. Today, there are many compelling use cases for mobile technology. AP: What do you think will drive mainstream adoption of mobile solutions? CS: Early customer success stories definitely drive demand. In some sense there's a "Keeping up with the Joneses" thing happening in the enterprise. Given the demands (either external pressure from Wall Street or pressure from internal customers who demand higher service levels), whatever is being done is always "better but not better enough." Even so, they need to be convinced that new IT tools provide tangible results. Once they're convinced, they adopt and assimilate them to improve the metrics that differentiate them within their industry. Most improvements that can be made through conventional ways - such as cost reductions, resizing the workforce and improving human productivity are already done. The next level of productivity gains can only come from having IT tools where work gets done. AP: What kinds of projects do you see IT organizations working on? CS: There isn't much "blue-sky" thinking going on these days within IT. Most projects I see getting the green-light are driven by a motivation to keep the organization responsive and agile and give end-users the tools to respond organically to critical issues, without having to get into "fire-drill" mode. The solutions themselves need to be adaptive to changing roles of the users and changing business processes of the company. AP: How important is configurability of mobile software by end-users? CS: Since 1982, IT has consistently been fighting a "losing control" battle and knows today that the best compromise is to embrace the individual while making sure their usage is secure, scalable and manageable. The mobile device is less important than the service which it ultimately delivers. So, locking down the device may not be the best idea. Embracing configurability and technologies like the BES for Security may be a great strategy to address the need for manageability. AP: What's your take on today's ROI models? CS: A lot of ROI model failures happen because companies fail to look beyond straight cost reductions and see the "opportunity costs" of freeing up key human talent. If a $10,000 piece of software can be used to automate a manual process done by a $40,000 employee, it frees up that employee to do something more productive, things that are probably closer to being revenue generating. Taking these opportunity costs into account are likely to generate realistic ROI models that give the enterprise a better sense of the benefits they derive from mobile
Chris Shipley can be reached at chris@cshipley.com. IOWA Turns One The Aeroprise Index of Wireless Activity, IOWA, walked before it could crawl, edging upward through most of its first year before breaking into a sprint in March. Now on the eve of its first birthday, it didn't do much of anything at all. Stocks took a southerly vacation this month and IOWA went with them despite significant wireless M&A activity. The index exits August down 1.65% at 170.69. What does the year ahead have in store for IOWA? As faster networks, cheaper data rates, and smarter devices proliferate, we can expect the pace of new mobile deployments to continue to increase. Unfortunately, we expect the wireless hype meter will follow suit. Upcoming Events Silicon Valley Bank Private Company Showcase San Mateo, CA October 6, 2004 CTIA Wireless IT 2004 San Francisco, CA October 25-27, 2004 Aeroprise in the News Network World: Taking Business Apps on the Road Industry Buzz Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones arriving as wireless carrier data strategies begin paying off Tip of the Month: Byte-Sized Reports Your managers and executives probably don't use desktop applications the way field technicians do. So why give them the same mobile applications? When they're on the road or in meetings they need access to concise reports that give them high-level access to just what they need to make on-the-spot decisions. Here's what you do: from the Administration Console or Personalization Console select 'Executive Summaries'. Build the report items you need based on your existing Aeroprise rules. Summarize the data from your rule by editing your report item. Group by field and apply calculations as you would through other reporting interfaces like Crystal. For instance, report on the average time that urgent tickets have been outstanding grouped by team and by technician or report on open issues that are within one hour of missing an SLA. Trivia Question: Wireless Data Solutions Taking Root Question: According to the Yankee Group's July 2004 enterprise mobility survey, what percentage of large U.S. businesses will deploy a wireless wide-area data solution by mid-2006? (a) 10% (b) 15%% (c) 49% (d) 55% (e) 65% source: Yankee Group [answer in next month's newsletter] Last month's question: What percentage of multinational corporations surveyed earlier this year ranked mobile data as a greater importance than voice? (a) 0% (b) 25% (c) 33% (d) 47% (e) 75% Last month's answer: According to the Yankee Group, (c) 33% of multinational corporations ranked mobile data as a greater importance than voice. We assume that the other two-thirds haven't discovered Aeroprise yet. Resources Aeroprise Newsletter Archives Aeroprise Newsletter Signup Mobilizing Your Applications: A Primer Aeroprise online demo Aeroprise customer case studies Aeroprise Partner Portal Questions o: +1(866)809-9102 f: +1(650)404-1185 information@aeroprise.com If you'd prefer not to receive future Aeroprise updates please click here. We never share subscriber information with anyone. |
