Tips for Managing the Mobile Enterprise

By Daniel Eckert

The mobile device is changing the customer experience and forcing organizations to re-think how they engage with their customers and employees. While many companies are beginning to understand how mobile devices can be used to grow customer loyalty, generate new revenue streams, and improve customer experience, they may be slow to realize how decision-making, workflow, collaboration, content delivery, and having the right information at the right time can improve the employee experience.

Below are three things business leaders should consider as they begin to prepare for the evolving mobile enterprise.

Reluctance to think through and prepare for cultural impacts
Enterprise mobility is complicated, because it impacts almost every part of an organization. The generation gap between boomers and millennials cannot be overlooked.  Different groups have different levels of comfort with new technologies.

Insufficient understanding of the technology
Successful mobile strategies optimize the end-user experience by offering information and content via the device types and delivery methods users prefer. In fact, it’s no longer practical (or even possible) to limit the solutions to a single brand of device. So, instead of controlling the hardware, focus should be on software and services.

Failure to embrace failure
The business should embrace a fast-fail capability. Such a capability fosters low-cost mechanisms and processes that let an organization launch and run multiple mobility experiments at the same time. Short duration projects enable you to quickly validate what is right and what is wrong.  It's OK to build an app that will only be used for six months and then thrown away.  

Your biggest challenge is fighting the "we've always done it this way" mentality. To be successful, embrace new ways of doing things. Mobility isn't about gadgets - it is about how you do things.

Daniel Eckert is a director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.