Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Mobility Means More Than Just Working Wirelessly

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2004 15:31:30 -0400

Mobility Means More Than Just Working Wirelessly

Jul 14, 2004

Believe it or not, there still are businesses whose CIOs are chary about
mobilizing the workforce. Most of the fear comes from the prospect of
having to spend money, some of it comes from the bugaboo of a
compromised network and some of it comes from road-warrior employees who
have come up with mobility solutions on their own rather than by working
within the company structure. What do service providers need to do to
assuage these fears and to prepared companies for what Accenture [ACN]
believes are the huge changes lurking just over the horizon?

Steve Lamont and Al Delattre are senior partners at Accenture, and
they've been studying ways in which vendors can help hesitant companies
overcome this fear of the unknown. One reason why companies have been
slow on the mobility uptake is that they are focusing on technology
instead of solutions, Lamont told Wireless Business Forecast. His
partner Delattre agrees, adding some companies slowly are coming on
board.

"Enterprises want all the new features, hardware, software and services
that are available today in order to architect solutions that create or
increase the value of their workers," he says. "When we talk to CIOs who
are faced with declining budgets and network insecurity, they see
[workforce] mobility as a lose/lose situation. But when we go to the
head of the sales department, we can sell the idea and the CIO can't
block it." However, there still needs to be a demonstrable return on
investment that the client can see.

Accenture believes a savvy wireless workforce that learned the
text-messaging, cellular, file-transfer and Internet-surfing ropes as
consumers is going to buck the company system and force the issue of
enterprise-wide adoption of mobility measures. The partners incorporate
that notion into their widely circulated list of five predictions that
can help companies turn threats and challenges into opportunities.

"Most enterprises feel they have a secure network, but I've seen all
sorts of business stuff sent through [employees'] private email,"
Delattre says. "There needs to be a bundled set of business solutions"
instituted by the company itself or workers will continue to find a way
to facilitate their own brands of mobility.

'Unexpected Sources'

Another prediction made by Lamont and Delattre is that the source of
demand for mobility likely will come from "unexpected sources" as new
value-creation opportunities appear. One of the companies already
benefiting from this particular prediction is SBC Communications [SBC],
which promotes its "Tech of the Future" program. The carrier has 20,000
techies out and about in trucks, servicing clients, and it finally
realized that such a fleet was an expensive asset that should be
exploited, as technicians are the people customers see first.

Says Delattre, "SBC now sends wireless dispatches to these techs in the
field that contain not only each customer's problem but also the history
the customer has had with the company. Techs also have access to online
training and help pages via the wireless network, and they even can
become salesmen if they see customer need."

Accenture also cites Virgin Mobile as being a company "that gets it."
Lamont says the virtual operator "thinks holistically" and caters
exclusively to the needs of its narrowly defined customer base: the
teen-to-30 market. Japan's NTT DoCoMo [DCM] also is described as a
company that's "not afraid to experiment."

What manufacturers, carriers and service providers have to do to sell
"mobility" to reticent businesses, the partners conclude, is to
fine-tune their presentations to include exactly how workers can use
mobility "to fundamentally transform the way commerce happens, not just
work unplugged."
>>Steve Lamont and Al Delattre, 441/296-8262<<

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