Technical interests

IS/IT customer overview/viewpoint:

One of the main issues that IT always considers during the purchase of new technology is how will this affect their current workload and what happens when the rollout is complete? IT groups have to support technology long after most of the project stakeholders and project managers have moved on to other things. As a seasoned IT professional they understand this and therefore they are notoriously skeptical of anything new because, good or bad, they are left with responsibility for the entire lifecycle of the product. One of the things that they learn early is that there are no easy projects, this is life in IT, but bad projects are to be avoided at all costs, additionally they would never willingly agree to the expansion of a project that was already going badly.
There have been few exceptions to this; usually they will only agree to go forward if they can be convinced of two things. The first is that the company providing the technology is as concerned about success as they are and will be long term. It is crucial that they have access to resources who have successfully managed a deployment of the technology that they are considering deploying. Secondly, if they are having an issue they want to understand what the issue is and what the vendor is doing to assure that this will not happen again and how they intend to work with them through the current issue. They would rather have a product that is less than optimal than one that they will have difficulty supporting.
This can be a larger issue than whether the technology has a great and undeniable benefit because if they determine that they cannot support the technology then the benefit is irrelevant to them. Often the benefit is irrelevant to them anyway.

Mitigation strategies- IS/IT concern over the difficulty of deploying new technology is especially sharp during times of challenge, this is never clearer that during initial deployment acceptance or during the process of moving from a small pilot to a larger much broader deployment.

Product familiarization- Obviously the way to overcome discreet product familiarization concerns, form factor, pen use, battery management, etc, is with a combination of product training and with the active involvement of the stakeholders and deployment people within the organization. Companies can usually assist with this through either structured training or ad hoc involvement of the sales person or the regional technical sales guys. This works marginally well as long as there are no external or product issues that cause additional concern.

Product ecosystem- This can be defined as the “terrain in which you are to be deployed” When describing this process it is important to understand that we are usually trying to either displace an existing technology or we are trying to differentiate ourselves from a competitive product. There are a number of issues that come into play with this process they range from minor to overwhelming depending on the severity of the problem. These are critical issues when determining how best to proceed with managing the customer experience.

These issues vary but mostly fall into three broad categories:
• Software issues like application compatibility, input modes, usability.
• Hardware issues like obvious product issues, input devices, form factor acceptance.
• Environmental issues like wireless, SSO or temperature or perhaps ESD related.

Traditionally companies have focused on VAR/Integrators and internal customer groups like IS/IT or perhaps the project champion to work with sales and to achieve successful acceptance. While this is not likely to change and is the most direct path to success it is important that companies also focus on making this easier for IT/IS to accept and therefore more successful.

What is “Mobility” and how is it defined?
Mobility has commonly been defined as the process of walking and standing while interfacing with an application. Therefore for a mobility solution a lightweight device with a different input mechanism from a keyboard is desirable and in fact probably necessary. Commonly it is assumed that if you have an application that you can use with a pen and/or touch, connectivity to the network via a wireless connection of some sort then “mobility” is achieved.

In a very narrow interpretation this would indeed be true, but if this is all that is necessary why is deploying and using the technology such a challenge to the people who are responsible for managing and supporting the devices?
The answer lies in the inherent issues that surround the hardware solution, most of these from an IS/IT perspective have nothing to do with the core end user application, they have to do with the IT systems that will need to be implemented to support the device. You have to make this simple and easy to integrate, A lot of times core product features actually exacerbate this problem rather than solve them. This is because they are not mainstream to the devices that they are already supporting.

How do you overcome these issues?
First you have to fully understand the “terrain in which we are deployed”, this means more than partnering with software vendors and developers who are creating mobility enhanced applications, and it is also more than assisting with the installation and development of high availability wireless networks. Companies need to focus on the entire mobility ecosystem. This will enable you to guide and provide assistance to the people that support the end user devices and guarantee successful long term integration of mobile products into the mainstream IT environment. Then internal staff can be partners and advocates rather than obstacles to overcome.

What do you need to do in order to make this happen?
1. A complete understanding of the entire environment that an IT group has to contend with. This will help us to provide guidance to the support groups and make them successful. This includes imaging, provisioning, authentication, physical and network security.
2. Partnerships with specialists who can provide these solutions. This is more than just a joint selling environment or one off co-development. It is the procurement of the resources that can actually provide guidance, deploy and configure technology in partnership with the end user support environment.
3. Constantly be looking ahead at where the IT/IS infrastructure is evolving and be able to turn this knowledge into solutions that customers can use and benefit from. You can not rely on local resources to figure this out, they may not be able to or may make decisions that are not in either their or ours best interest.

It is important to remember that you are not forcing change you are facilitating the transition to the inevitable result of end user mobility. In other words, you are providing thought leadership and behaving as partners rather than just one more product that the IS/IT group has to deal with. This can be a real differentiator for you and enable you to provide a more meaningful relationship with the groups that will ultimately determine device purchases. I truly believe that in the end it is not the CIO or the end users but an overworked desktop support person who will be able to dictate more technology purchases than not.