How to build a mobility business case
To conduct mobility research, look at both specific dollar returns and more qualitative benefits.
By Howard Baldwin
In summary:
| • | To get the most out of mobile technology, start with your strategic goals. |
| • | Don't discount "soft" productivity benefits of flexibility for employees. |
For some companies, building a mobility business case is easy. Take Chicago-based Grant Thornton LLP, which provides financial services consulting to midsize enterprises. According to CIO David Holyoak, 80 percent of Grant Thornton employees are mobile, traveling to and from clients' offices. If an accountant or tax attorney can address client concerns and bill for their time from almost anywhere, even if they're using public transportation, the firm can easily justify deploying laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and other mobile devices.
As you consider your own business case for deploying mobile technology, you undoubtedly understand its capability to provide employees convenient access to corporate data and e-mail. But unless you're counterfeiting currency, you still need to quantify convenience.
You can start your mobility research with a simple cost-benefit analysis, but there's more to it than that. Look at your company's strategic goals and see how deploying mobile technology will support them. Consider the value you'll derive in specific vertical scenarios (such as field sales and field support applications) as well as horizontally (in terms of employees' ability to collaborate). Finally, assess the so-called soft returns from mobility—which you may be able only to estimate.
Payback starts with strategic goals
The problem with mobile technology is that it's frequently advertised as sleek and sexy, leading some people to covet it whether it can make them more productive or not. But few midsize companies can afford to buy technology for technology's sake, nor should they.
Holyoak suggests starting mobility research by calculating what the deployment will cost, and what you will gain from it. For some real-life examples, see Related Links. For more on how your IT department needs to deal with deployment, see IT's 8-Point Mobility Checklist.
The cost of deployment encompasses the following outlay:
| • | Hardware (laptops, smartphones, PDAs, cell phones) |
| • | Software (custom development or off-the-shelf purchases) |
| • | Accessories (carrying cases, extra charging cradles, power cords) |
| • | Training and technical support |
These must be balanced against their potential value. Because companies' goals and needs (and thus costs) are different, let's take three hypothetical examples in applications in which organizations frequently apply mobile technology, and map the strategic goals to mobile technology.
1. Application: Field Sales
Corporate strategy: Increase per-transaction revenue from customers.
Scenario: Customers might be more likely to commit to a purchase if they know inventory is readily available. By outfitting salespeople with mobile devices that offer access to corporate databases, they can both confirm availability and request immediate shipping.
Calculations necessary: Average current sales; hourly cost of salespeople; average amount of time salespeople spend confirming inventory availability; average number of sales lost due to delay.
2. Application: Field Support
Corporate strategy: Increase cash flow
Scenario: When support technicians visit customers, they write up invoices and deliver them either on paper or by fax to headquarters where accounting personnel key them in again. If it's busy, it might take several days to get invoices into the system, and rekeying information presents multiple opportunities for errors. Consider an application that lets technicians tally charges, confirm them with customers, and upload them into the accounting system either through a wireless connection or by synchronization at the end of the day. The result: faster receivables and fewer errors.
Calculations necessary: Hourly cost of accounting personnel; cost of money; hourly cost of technicians; cost of hard-copy storage.
3. Application: Collaboration
Corporate strategy: Improve time to market by decreasing the amount of time it takes to make product decisions.
Scenario: When determining what products to build or services to deploy, companies conduct research and development, and prepare arguments for the value of particular products versus others. In highly competitive markets, being first to market can offer a significant advantage. Giving executives mobile e-mail technology allows them to consider proposals no matter where they are and, therefore, reduces the time required to launch a product.
Calculations necessary: Amount of time potentially saved through faster decision making; revenue from sales within that time period.
One more piece of advice: Think beyond obvious costs. Kirk Harding, president of Concord, California-based Bay Computing, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, suggests that deploying mobile technology to some users might reduce your company's need for office space. "You can shrink the size of your physical presence and offer meeting rooms and desks for the occasional times when workers are in the office," Harding says. In urban areas where real estate is at a premium, this can represent significant savings.
Specific payback versus suspected payback
Even though it's fairly simple to calculate the return on investment of mobile technology, don't ignore the potential for soft savings—the kind that aren't so easy to estimate but that your intuition tells you exist. When Intel standardized on laptops, for example, it wanted a common platform for the majority of employees, and laptops allowed easier collaboration. But two unexpected advantages emerged.
"We discovered that when employees took their laptops home, they became what we call 'day extenders.' They may duck out to spend a couple of hours at a child's soccer game, but they can still check their e-mail after dinner," says Richard A. Lansford, a business value analyst in Intel's IT department. Senior management discovered that employees worked anywhere from three to eight hours more per week because they could access corporate systems.
The second advantage: Mobility supports business continuity. "In the last few years, Intel employees have had to deal with snow closures and burst water mains, but because they had their laptops, they were able to telecommute and never missed a beat," Lansford says.
The more you think about mobile technology's potential, and the experience and comfort you gain with it, the more you can think about how further deployments might help next year's strategic goals.
Silicon Valley-based freelancer Howard Baldwin keeps his first laptop, a Compaq Aero, in his attic, just in case he ever needs to remind himself what Microsoft Windows 3.1 looks like.
