Setting Goals in Mobility

Continuing our blog series on seven critical moves for an excellent mobility experience in 2020, we’d like to focus on the importance of setting goals for mobile operations. When it comes to digital transformation – the process of using digital technologies to create new, or modify existing, business practices to meet changing business and market requirements – goal-setting is essential. To illustrate this, let’s look at two different approaches to digital transformation.  

The Acme Corporation (name has been changed) is an IT company with employees all around the globe, working mainly at the office but also with remote capabilities. All their business processes are mobilized, and employees are provided with mobile devices (laptop, smartphone, tablet) for work. Most of their data infrastructure has been migrated a few years ago from on-premises to cloud-based to reduce costs, simplify IT operations (i.e. maintenance and support), ensure better performance, and globally provide better and more accessible service. 

The ABC Company (name has been changed) is a customer care/attention office subsidiary for a large electrical company. All their work processes are already digitized and all their employees work at the office Mon-Fri 9-5 and use their computer to perform all administrative tasks; they also have landline phones to make/receive internal calls. 

Both companies are successful in their business and nothing would indicate that either of them might not have done their homework.  

Well, once the unexpected COVID-19 pandemic occurred, these two successful companies coped with the challenges very differently based their mobile preparedness.  

Acme decided to send all of their employees home. Fortunately, this was no big deal for any of them as they were all already used to working with mobile devices. On Day 1, it was business as usual! For the ABC Company, though, this was a completely different story – and unfortunately more of a drama than a comedy. 

First they had to decide whether or not to completely shut down the physical office and close it to the public; this was the easy part. The hard part was to get their employees up and running in a timely manner from their home. Most of them had to go pick up their desktop computer and equipment and head home, where they would need to find room for everything before they could get back online again. Soon they realized they had no proper communication system in place (remember, they use office landline phones), so they had to improvise and use the WhatsApp consumer-oriented IM platform to be able to chat, call in, and make video calls, unaware of the potential risk of handling work related calls, information, and documents via a consumer application. Another issue was the impossibility to access some of their internal systems, not virtualized nor available from the Internet, so they had to call the company managing their IT infrastructure and have them allow remote connections, virtually compromising security (no computer was even UEM-managed) to ensure service was restored ASAP. Of course, this also came at an unexpected additional cost. 

The biggest component was their stage of digitalization, which in Acme’s case was more than adequate to adapt to a remote working environment, but with ABC, their struggle to adapt is owed to a lack of planning and goal-setting when it comes to digital transformation.  

By embracing digital transformation, Acme was able to easily adapt to a remote work environment. ABC, on the other hand, relied on resources only available within their office. Had ABC already made plans for digital transformation, the adjustment to working remotely would have been less difficult.  

This underlines the importance of setting goals in mobile operations; and not only setting goals, but having primary, secondary, and tertiary goals in place so that the most crucial aspects of digital transformation are achieved first. Keeping the focus on high level goals, such as increasing revenue, investing in innovation, and reducing error rates, will ensure achievability. When setting goals, companies must also keep in mind who is responsible for the overall function. This ties back to our blog post highlighting the importance of ownership, and of owners staying in touch with their stakeholders.  

If the goal of digital transformation is set early on, and the company invests in technology and encourages employees to embrace technology, any bumps in the road that may occur will be dealt with much more smoothly and confidently. Ultimately, setting goals for year-end results in mobile operations will help companies save money, operational costs and time with the adoption of a digital workspace.

(C) Rémi Frédéric Keusseyan, Mobility Expert/Master Trainer 

Scource: lookout.com