Reality check: mobilizing the enterprise: Corporate pioneers tell their tales

You’re hearing a dizzying stream of promises and jargon aimed at convincing businesses to “go mobile.”
But you’d like to hear unvarnished advice from folks who have done the heavy lifting. Case studies, from the horse’s mouth.
Ya shoulda been at the roundtable Monday sponsored by AT&T Mobility and Accenture, which featured executives from Adidas Group, DirecTV and KLA-Tencor Corp. (The latter makes testing equipment to gauge semiconductor performance.)
The result was a freewheeling exchange, modestly attended but closely followed by an audience clearly intent on raising productivity and profit while sidestepping the sand traps posed by needed corporate culture shifts, technology assessments and, oh yeah, having a plan.
“Don’t delay,” said Abhi Ingle, VP for AT&T Mobility’s mobility applications consulting group and one of two moderators. “Get moving. You leave money on the table as each day passes.”
Begin discussions right away with a balanced swath of stakeholders, Ingle added. Hone your ideas about critical applications, get advice, develop a plan and a budget. Deployment, whenever it comes, will benefit from a surfeit of thinking.
Greg Jenko, a partner at Accenture and the other moderator, said that enterprise interest in mobility had jump-started at the turn of the century, then slowed. Now, however, it is picking up steam again.
“Now, our clients are very tapped into those capabilities,” Jenko said. “Clients are asking, ‘What else can I do to drive greater business value?'”
The panel had a diversity of tales to tell. More than one described resistance by I.T. departments, another spoke of cultivating end-user involvement and yet another told of incremental pilot programs that unleashed demand by other departments.
“Our No. 1 worry was no I.T. support,” said Tim Oligmueller, a manager for sales force automation at Adidas Group. “Sales and I.T. had a head-banging relationship. I knew that whatever the solution, it had to be completed with minimal I.T. involvement.”
That clash by I.T. was cited in Tuesday’s keynote address by none other than Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft Corp., which is releasing a new suite of products and services early next year to address ease-of-adoption issues in mobilizing the enterprise.
“You need the end user onboard,” said Erik Walters, manager of sales operations/technical operations at DirecTV. “They’re the ones who sink or swim. User adoption was our No. 1 priority. Now we ask them, are we getting this right?”
“We put a lot of emphasis on training,” said Manoj Koduru, I.T. program manager at KLA-Tencor. “Web-based training didn’t work-that involved too many interruptions. Our hands-on (in person) training ended up successful.”
In the end, Koduru said, KLA-Tencor used a phased, incremental rollout.
“We ironed out what we could with 60 users (before broader deployment),” Koduru said. “I have no regrets.”
“If we’d known our end user needs better, our deployment would have been smoother,” added Walters.
Several panelists nodded knowingly when AT&T Mobility’s Ingle said that pilots of sales force automation would unleash “an explosion of demand” by other departments.
Not only would a broad swath of employees seek the observed productivity benefits, Accenture’s Jenko said, but mobilizing thousands of global sales personnel was likely to lead to shifts in the way those employees do business.
DirecTV’s Walters said that his company had had a good experience with a wide swath of vendors, who understood the other vendors’ piece of the puzzle.
Oligmueller added that vendors who can illuminate the technology roadmap will help companies shed light on future options.
And there are soft benefits that can’t be discounted, Oligmueller added.
“Mobility gave our sales team flexibility to blend their work and personal lives, witch helped with retention of our sales force,” the Adidas executive said.
The resulting improvements in customer service had DirecTV’s constituents “blown away,” said Walters.
Anything the players would have done differently? the moderators prodded.
“If you do due diligence up front, you’ll reap the benefits,” said Walters.