People on the move – Value from Mobility becomes a reality, finally! November 20, 2007
Posted by Jari Tavi in : Differentiation , trackback
I still recall the time when 3G technologies was still a hype that everybody talked and I clearly recall the high expectations which led to a significant disappointment when they never materialized. There are multiple reasons why development was a disappointment starting from availability and coverage of network infrastructure and market penetration of 3G phones. Europe was driving this 3G end user services based development with huge investment – and thus huge disappointments.
Another disappointment was US driven activity around Enterprise Applications and mobile devices. Despite the fact that BlackBerry has been considered to be a huge success, the volume of devices has been around 4-5M units, which is very low compared to worldwide sales volumes of the mobile phones of 1.13B units based on Gartner group’s estimate after Q2 of 2007. So, in short, specialized phones have not created momentum enough to really make the breakthrough in Enterprise Application area. So it is, at least a small, disappointment here as well.
It was already almost five years ago when I joined BasWare, coming from a mobile communications and networks background, when I heard the request for “why not to make a mobile phone approval client”. My immediate answer was no, after seeing all the challenges with different phone types, limited network technology, lack of reliable always-on solution etc.
Since that time, I have re-evaluated the decision each year, and finally, about two years ago, it seemed like almost all the “tick marks on the evaluation form” started to be there. Of course we needed to evaluate the technology curve and make “guesstimates” about two years ahead to analyze that the new technology would be widely enough available when and if we would launch a product. As soon as we believed that the technology is there, we started a comprehensive requirements’ analysis together with our customers to make sure that the product would truly meet the needs of customers and would be available widely enough to create a critical mass of end users to make it commercially viable solution.
Well, now we have it – BasWare MobileClient is out, and it supports in its initial version Nokia S60 (namely E-Series has been tested) and BlackBerry 7000 and 8000 series phones, and guess what, the initial feedback from the customers’ side has been very positive.
One of the most important things we did during the development cycle was a careful analysis of requirements and that led to situation where we did a radical re-architecting of our initial product architecture plans., This, on other hand, led us to a significant innovation. Our initial plan was to start with one client for each Enterprise Purchase-to-Pay (“EPP”) role (e.g. Invoice Automation approver or Purchase Management buyer), but it soon became evident, that the value to the customer was significantly lower if we did not think about the whole process from the beginning. So here we decided to switch the short development time to higher customer value from the beginning. Another design goal we changed after requirements’ analysis was the device dependence. Initially we planned implementing the application only to two to three Nokia models and then expand from those to other models and platforms. However, after the requirements analysis the goal was reset to enable the design for all Nokia S60 models and some other platform from the day one. This was a smart move! Yet again, we switched the short development time to something else – in this case it was customer value and market penetration.
What did it mean then, that we placed the customer value higher than the shorter application development time? It led to a situation, where we learned the true critical requirements of the solution sooner rather than later. This required us to really use the “gray matter” in between our ears to find a solution to the problem. What we also learned was that there is still plenty of room for innovation in this area (and thus the patent application was filed) and by investing to the front end development instead of taking the “quick and dirty” path, we established a foundation for further development. Actually one of the biggest findings of the project was that the same foundation (one client application) can actually be used to drive any BasWare EPP application – or in theory any other business application as well – when needed.
Now that the application has been in production with a decent number of end users for some time already, we have received pretty promising feedback. Some end users have even said that they now use the MobileClient instead of WebClient as it is so easy to use anywhere even without network connectivity. This was one of the design goals that we considered and reset the priority and now I am very happy that we put things like the offline use as a top priority item to our requirements.
The most important conclusions around this effort are:
• Understand the true customer value that mobility and mobile phones enable
• Focus on usability, ease of use and offline capabilities
• Take a process focus rather than vertical application silo focus
• Make it easier to use than Web – make it always available
What did I personally learn from this project? For the first time in 10 years I have a feeling that mobility is truly around the corner. The enabling mobile phone and network technologies are both finally here. Now the show stopper is no more the network technology and mobile devices but rather the limited understanding of architects and developers. The limited understanding comes mainly from two things:
• Mobile devices require different approach from Web applications and thus they require re-education of the designers and programmers
• Existing applications should not be “recompiled” to mobile environment, but they should be re-factored to become more process oriented than most of the business applications are today. This re-factoring is easier if the presentation layer of applications support WebServices or other SOA model based technologies.
It was a very educating and bracing experience to innovate the new way of enabling value for customer processes with mobile devices. This is the promise that some of the Web 2.0 is expected to deliver, but we have now learned that the promise can be delivered already today.
Value for Business – Mobility!