The announcement earlier this month that SAP is partnering with Sybase to deliver SAP business applications to Blackberrys and iPhones has the potential to put enterprise computing literally in the hands of end-users for the first time. The prospect of the ‘anytime, anywhere’ enterprise sounds compelling but behind the hyperbole of the initial announcement there are many unanswered questions around how best to harness the capability for business benefit. Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor looks at the quick wins for this technology and where businesses will need more convincing before taking the plunge.
The world’s love affair with the mobile phone is all around us. By any measure it has been an astonishing success on a global basis. No wonder then that so many service offerings are destined for these popular devices. To date much of the innovation has been around personal entertainment, such as music downloads, maps and digital photography but the business use of the mobile phone has remained largely confined to emails and attachments. SAP and Sybase is the first major initiative to tap into the rich seam of untapped business potential. However, the initial messages are confused. For example, do the benefits lie in more efficient information delivery or more responsive business processes or both?
Vishal Sikka CTO SAP is effusive about information delivery, “In this economic crisis it is extremely important that business users are able to take the right decisions based on the right information, right now. You cannot wait to get back to your desk to approve an exception, look at a scorecard, or dashboard, or some business event that is critical to your business”, he gushes.
However, the notion that decision making has to be instantaneous (recession or no recession) seems a little farfetched. Getting decision makers to pay attention to dashboards and scorecards is a challenge at the best of times. Businesses are littered with failed scorecarding projects. So why should delivery of a scorecard on a mobile device make any difference? Furthermore, any negative scorecard indicators (or unexpected positives for that matter) are certain to require more investigation by drilling down on variances, unmasking poorly performing products, regions and people – something that a decision maker is unlikely to do on his mobile in the street.
Greg Schneider, Vice President, at Adaptive Planning, a vendor of on-demand budgeting, planning and forecasting software sees little demand for delivery of alerts or KPIs to mobile phones. He told FSN, “We are continually looking at product enhancement but our customers have not expressed any interest in delivery of information to mobile devices. We deliver alerts by email but we are not seeing any interest beyond that.”
Information delivered in support of sales effort is another matter. Martin Redington, Director, Microgen plc, a specialist in information management sees demand for certain applications. “We have seen an insurance client wanting its salesmen to receive online quotes as PDF documents directly from underwriters onto their Blackberrys,” he told FSN. It seems that events in the sales cycle are the most amenable to mobile technology, where perhaps speed is of the essence and it’s easier to see value added. SAP itself highlights the potential for sales managers to approve sales bids and discounts while on the hoof. Prashant Chatterjee, Director of mobility and analytics at SAP, says, “Mobile computing empowers salesmen to do complex deals in a more timely fashion.”
But what’s wrong with a laptop? Redington believes the bulkiness and inconvenience of laptops could be one of the factors that accelerate the move towards mobile phones. “All of our executives travel between offices and presently have to stop in a coffee shop somewhere to boot up a laptop, insert a 3G card and download emails. It wastes so much time. A mobile phone is so much better,” he says.
According to John Chen, CEO Sybase, people expect to use any device such as a mobile phone, desktop computer or laptop to access the same applications using the same interfaces. “It’s about anytime, anywhere and any place,” he says. Redington agrees, “There is so little ‘fat’ in our organisation that you have to do many of the tasks yourself. Mobile tools and reliance on mobile devices is becoming more acute.”
But it is improvements in processes, rather than pure information delivery, where arguably organisations stand to benefit the most from enterprise computing on a mobile phone. Workflow approvals are widely seen as an area that will quickly bear fruit. “Mobile isn’t just about email anymore”, says Vishal Sikka CTO SAP. The ability to route workflow approvals to executives on the move could be an area of rapid take up for mobile phones. “We are doing it ourselves,” says Microgen’s Redington. “We are constantly on the move and make use of Microsoft SharePoint for workflow. Delivery of purchase order approvals to an iPhone is extremely useful – it’s about not holding the process up,” he adds.
However, with office workers already complaining about ‘information overload’ it is legitimate to ask whether people can actually cope with workflow approvals and alerts in addition to their daily diet of emails – and just because the technology is available doesn’t mean that it is a business necessity. The fact that working practices between office and home are becoming blurred is beyond doubt but serious questions need to be asked about what aspects of this embryonic technology are going to add value.
The age of the “Enterprise on the Move” has arrived but it brings with it considerations of economic return as well as corporate social responsibility.
