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Five key factors to consider when choosing software for your mobile customer relationshipmanagement capability.

Organizations considering a mobile solution are faced with many choices and factors – from the most basic issue of choosing the right device, through networking, security and other factors. There are several key decision factors to consider when examining a CRM mobile solution, including:

• Functionality. Does the mobile application provide the functionality required by your business needs? How can you ensure that mobile users will adopt the application and use it effectively?
• Availability. How capable is the solution of enabling mobile end users to interact with data over limited-bandwidth wireless networks? Can mobile users reliably access the application as they switch between different connectivity environments – online, offline, cradle synchronization, wireless LAN and WWAN?
• Flexibility and adaptability. Do you expect your business needs or corporate systems to change over time? Does your mobile application have the flexibility to adapt to your changing requirements and emerging technologies?
• Manageability and maintainability. Once deployed, will your IT group be able to efficiently manage hundreds of mobile devices, their associated user definitions, security settings, etc.? How will software updates be delivered to mobile users?
• Total cost of ownership. What are the short-term and long-term costs of implementing, managing and maintaining the solution?

Building Your Business Case

It is crucial that you clearly define your business case and mobility requirements prior to diving into technical questions. Here are three main steps to follow:

• Identify the business problems you are trying to solve and how mobility can improve efficiency by accelerating the flow of information within the organization. Examples are inefficient dispatching processes, lack of critical data in the field, manual or paper-based processes, an unmanageable amount of calls to the call center and erroneous data entry.
• Characterize the benefits you want to achieve and determine how you will measure them. Identify areas where mobile work will deliver business value – both in the short and long run – and try to quantify the hard benefits (e.g., improving productivity, automating processes, reducing administrative tasks and phone calls), as well as the soft benefits (e.g., better customer service, visibility into field work, and data accuracy).
• Build the ROI and estimate the payback period. Perform a careful analysis of the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the solution, including direct, indirect and hidden costs.

Decision Factor 1: Functionality And Mobile Capabilities

Before selecting a mobile solution, you must evaluate whether its functionality suits your current needs: What tasks will mobile workers be able to perform, and how will they interact with corporate data remotely using mobile devices? In the ideal world, corporate applications would arrive with built-in capabilities that support every handheld device. In reality, the wide gap between corporate applications and devices must be addressed.

User-centric functionality. A key to achieving productivity-based returns from any software solution is to ensure that users adopt and use it effectively. For example, the wireless user experience is crucial – mobile salespeople must experience acceptable response times when remotely accessing their CRM data, or else they will not adopt the solution. In a mobile field service application, usability means that the application is built around end-user tasks, guiding users through their daily workflow and delivering the right data at the right time. In PDA-based applications, usability means that form factor and limited data entry capabilities are taken into account, and methods are provided to ease the work of end users.

Business process oriented. Many analysts point out that prepackaged mobile solutions don’t really exist. Since the needs and business processes of organizations are always unique, a mobile solution can provide true value only if it can be tailored to the unique business processes of the enterprise.

Direct extension of existing applications. The objective of any mobile implementation should be to minimize modifications to back office systems. A successful mobile solution must have the ability to move into an enterprise with packaged feature sets that “turn on” key elements of a company’s infrastructure. From the line-of-business point of view, this cuts down implementation time; from the IT standpoint, it is crucial to maintain a single set of master records without duplicating data for mobility needs.

Mobile capabilities. Extending corporate applications to mobile devices requires a comprehensive set of underlying mobile capabilities, such as supporting multiple devices and interaction modes, networking, synchronization, session handling, security, pushing alerts and data to devices, etc.

Decision Factor 2: Availability

One of the characteristics of mobile work is continually changing connectivity. In the course of a day, a mobile worker may experience any combination of the following connectivity scenarios:

• Dialup connectivity;
• Wireless connectivity (wireless LAN, GPRS, 1xRTT);
• No connectivity (due to lack of coverage or restricted areas); and
• Full corporate access over LAN (e.g., cradle synchronization).

A mobile solution must provide an environment where a mobile worker can seamlessly switch between these connectivity scenarios without disruption and with minimal impact on the availability of the application. For example, in the pharmaceutical market, sales reps are often prohibited from using wireless devices at a doctor’s office. Still, mobile workers should be able to continue their work and then synchronize data when a connection is available.

Some additional issues to consider in relation to the availability of mobile applications include:

• Delivering the right data at the right time. In addition to supporting multiple connectivity scenarios, a mobile application must be able to adapt to the user’s connectivity environment and to the specific task at hand – in order to deliver the right data at the right time. For instance, a field technician connecting over a wireless network and requesting task details for the next customer requires immediate data delivery. However, the application must also be able to detect low-bandwidth connectivity and refrain from sending a large-volume inventory update during this sync.
• Pushing notifications and alerts. The ability to push messages out to mobile devices is one of the key elements of mobile work. When data changes in your corporate system (e.g., an urgent customer service request), you want to be able to alert a mobile user of the new data, rather than wait until that user performs a synchronization.
• Optimizing performance. Performance can be painfully slow when data travels over wireless networks. Consider, for example, that field technicians must have large amounts of client history data on their devices. A mobile application must be capable of optimizing data delivery over low-bandwidth wireless networks.
• User experience. Particularly because of the problems posed by wireless networks (fading wireless signals, disconnections), the user experience is crucial. Users must feel as though they are using a reliable network even if they are not, so that their work is not affected by, say, a loss of wireless signal in the midst of a task.
• Reliability and scalability. The mobile application must be fully available during peak load times, for instance at the beginning of the work day when all technicians sync to receive their daily schedules, while being able to scale up to support a growing number of concurrent users.

Decision Factor 3: Flexibility And Adaptability

The mobile solution you select today will need to adapt over time to new market conditions, new customer needs, changes in business processes, and emerging technologies. Organizations that build mobile solutions from the ground up sometimes find that they code themselves into a corner. In other words – they end up building an application that is not flexible, adaptable or scalable.

One key advantage of implementing a solution using a solid mobile platform, or what is often called a wireless application gateway, is that it will be easier to adapt to changes down the road. Change can mean many things. Consider the following:

• Adding functionality. The mobile service application built today may cover the immediate needs of, say, dispatching and billing. But future needs may require remote access to a corporate knowledge base, the ordering of parts, delivery of service agreements, and so on.
• Adapting to business process changes. Organizational business processes are anything but static. Changes can be minimal – such as an escalation process to support a new service level agreement – or comprehensive, encompassing many functions. A mobile solution must be supported by an architecture and a set of tools that allow it to adapt to such changes.
• Adapting to back office application changes. Over time, corporate systems change – they are either upgraded or completely replaced with more advanced systems. The functionality of the end-user mobile application, on the other hand, may not require any changes. The challenge is to efficiently adapt your mobile system to deliver data from, say, Clarify, instead of from your home-grown application – without recoding the application from scratch.
• Adapting to technology changes. Mobile applications and network technologies are still evolving. Therefore, any implementation path you take today must be open and scalable to support emerging network, server and device technologies.
• Consistency across multiple applications. When mobile solutions are custom-built, they are often designed with little foresight as to future applications. While your initial goal may be to mobilize a data-collection task, you may want to mobilize your remote sales team later on.

Decision Factor 4: Manageability And Maintainability

Managing an enterprise mobile application presents an IT organization with a range of activities, which can turn into a nightmare if not addressed with the proper methodology and tools. Here are some management and maintenance tasks to consider:

• User and device management. Devices and their associated users must be defined and personalized for individual users during initial system deployment and then managed on an ongoing basis. Security authorizations must be set up and enforced for users/devices. Stolen or lost devices need to be blocked from accessing the enterprise.
• Synchronization management. An enterprise might want to enforce the periodic synchronization of specific data by users, such as price lists. Administrators must be able to define and update synchronization schedules.
• Remote user support. Administrators must be able to support and troubleshoot problems of mobile users. Problems need to be detected, diagnosed and fixed remotely.
• Software distribution. Organizations should be able to download new software versions to devices and track their deployment status.
• Security is one of the top concerns of any IT group. Some of the key security issues include the prevention of unauthorized users from accessing information stored on the device; authenticating devices and users when accessing enterprise data; deactivating stolen or lost devices; and preventing replay attacks, device replications and communication session intrusions.

Decision Factor 5: Total Cost Of Ownership

Cost is probably the most important factor when considering a mobile project. The direct costs of a mobile enterprise solution are easier to identify, including:

• Hardware (mobile device hardware, network cards, mobile servers);
• Software licenses (for devices, back office servers, application servers, etc.); and
• Software development costs.

The less visible indirect costs are related to the ongoing maintenance of the system and include the costs of wireless network services, maintenance, the added burden on IT to manage and update the mobile application, and training employees to use new tools.

Below are some other cost-related factors you should consider in a mobile solution. Bear in mind that the total cost of ownership is only one side of the coin. To make an educated decision about a mobile solution that will provide you with the greatest bottom-line impact, you should examine both the total cost and the total benefits.

• Mobile device TCO. The TCO of wireless-enabled handheld devices is estimated to be significantly lower than that of laptops. According to Frost & Sullivan, laptop cost is $12,300 per year and wireless PDA cost is $2,600 per year. These figures do not mean that handheld devices are necessarily the right choice.
• Development costs. Assuming time to market is important, consider how long it will take the vendor to build and deliver the mobile solution that fits your business needs. While packaged solutions seem attractive on paper, business needs are always unique, and the existence of a prepackaged solution that fits all is doubtful.
• Management. A mobile project does not end on the date it goes live. IT staff need to support remote mobile workers, configure and add new devices to the system, and distribute software updates. When evaluating operational costs, you should examine the management tools provided by a mobile solution and assess the IT bandwidth that will be required to support it.
• Maintenance and enhancements. As your business model changes, you will want to update and enhance your mobile solution. Consider the tools and architecture of the solution and assess the cost implications for application updates and maintenance.
• Data delivery. Wireless data networks charge by the byte. If your business requires delivering a large volume of data to mobile workers, then evaluate whether a mobile solution provides a technology or tools to minimize data delivery costs.

Conclusion

Choosing a mobile solution is a complicated task that requires careful examination of many choices and factors. Among the key decision factors are functionality, availability, flexibility, maintainability and total cost of ownership.

When considering all these factors, you will find that no single solution fits them all. Rather, success will depend largely on the ability of the mobile application to effectively support the needs of your mobile workers and the specific business processes of your organization.

In addition, the application you deploy should be supported by a comprehensive infrastructure that addresses the many aspects of mobility – from connectivity and synchronization issues to performance, reliability and security. This will help you to ensure that once the application goes live – over real networks and with a load of hundreds of remote users – it can reliably provide the required functionality.

Finally, it is important that you protect your investment for the future so that the mobile solution you select today can easily adapt to new market conditions, new customer needs, changes in business strategy and emerging technologies.