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The DO's and DON'Ts of mobile solutions
April 27, 2004
We've been doing a number of presentations over the last few months under the heading above. I thought it might be a good regular theme to report on the top DO's and DON'ts that we come across as we build mobile and wireless solutions. So here's one to kick us off.
The "soft stuff" will kill ya.
It's common when thinking about designing a new mobility solution to focus on the technology - what techies typically percieve as being both the "cool" stuff, and the hard stuff: GPRS, data rates, XML-RPC, device operating systems, synchronisation strategies, on-device security. It's often easy to forget that on any given project, it's probably the "soft" stuff will cause the most trouble.
From our experience, the soft stuff covers a number of areas:
- The introduction of a new mobility solution sometimes has the potential to cause significant political issues in an organisation. It's very easy for people in the field to percieve the technology as being "big brother" in nature - enabling detailed activity and behaviour tracking. It is highly advisable to take account of this when planning out how the new solution will be introduced.
- In many cases, a mobility solution is being introduced where no technology was in use before. For example, field sales staff may currently be using a paper-based and phone-based system to record orders. This is quite a leap to make. There is a strong need to design comprehensive training and support systems into any planned rollout as a result.
- "Field champions" can make or break you. Typically, when a mobile field force is being introduced to a new system, there are key influencers with the field force who can help set the tone for the rest of the group. We call these people the field champions, and we make it part of the planning to try and identify and work with the champions from an early stage. If they're convinced, then it will be much easier for the rest of the group to accept the new system.
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