We told you about systems of engagement in chapter 10. We’re now going to describe how this technology platform helps you transform your business processes by serving up one task at a time.
Here’s your challenge. If you work at a large company, you’ve probably got tens of thousands of employees who want access to your data systems to participate in the processes that make up their jobs. Consider the challenge of building the technology platform to support 11,000 eld technicians at Dish Network or 19,000 ight attendants at Delta Air Lines.
Over the past 40 years, companies have spent trillions of dollars building complex applications for employees sitting in front of a computer. These applications are not designed for mobile. They’re too complex. Employees on the go need just enough information and a single action button to complete the task, not complex screens and
onerous data entry.4 They’ve been trained by the ve-star consumer apps that they use
at home.
You will have to re-engineer the APIs to your core data systems to serve up just the right amount of data and action for each mobile moment. You need cloud platforms to serve information to a variety of devices faster, and you must also re-engineer the way the systems work together. If you just shrink down the web interface to tiny dimensions, you’ll find the software can’t deal with the demands of the mobile moment.
Let’s take a look another eld service example, because it is rich with insight into how to engineer the processes and platform for mobile moments.
Randy Tomlin, senior vice president of eld operations for AT&T’s TV, phone, and Internet service called U-verse, had to engineer an entirely di erent technology platform to help his 21,000 eld technicians hit a two-hour time window for each customer visit.
Six years ago, Randy set out to revamp the technician-customer engagement to install broadband and television services. He wanted U-verse to “have the right moment with the right technician for every one of our 10 million customers.” He knew that giving tablets to technicians was key to that mission. “We had to make it easy for a technician to initiate a step and have it cascade through six or eight back-end systems before coming back with a single answer.”
The problem was those “six or eight back-end systems.” That software wasn’t designed to serve up tasks in a mobile moment. When he realized that software was the critical component of hitting the two-hour window, Randy decided that he had to become a technology guy. (Only a technology guy says things like, “we do all our testing in the cloud” and “I love APIs” and “innovation is now an ecosystem.”) So he made friends with the technology department.
Randy and his new friends in the technology department broke the service process down into discrete tasks then stitched together what a tech needed in each mobile moment using new APIs: 23 of them for field technicians and three more for managers.
They also instrumented the entire process to collect data and gave eld managers a data dashboard on an iPad with real-time status updates.
The results were phenomenal. U-verse now hits that two-hour window so often that eld service is a major contributor to AT&T’s success in television. U-verse TV was ranked highest in overall satisfaction in the North Central region where it operates, according to the J.D. Power 2013 US Residential Television Service Provider Satisfaction Study.5 And it has gained so much e ciency that it can now make one additional
service call every day. That means Randy can serve 15,000 more customers every day. Not only that, by giving local managers tablets with real-time visibility into what’s going on in the field, Randy’s managers are saving 90 minutes per day in manual tasks.
What should you take away from AT&T U-verse’s engineering success with eld service?
First, know that this is hard. Randy says that he is the North Star to keep everybody on track. Randy got support to upgrade the back-end systems to support the mobile apps from the very top of the organization.
Second, “atomize” your business processes into the discrete tasks. Don’t let back-end complexity sap the life from your mobile employees. Simplify things by serving up just the information and actions they need in each moment.6 Under the relentless redesign
of mobile moments, processes become tasks (see Table 11-1).
Lastly, build software APIs that expose just what’s needed in that moment. Each API handles a tiny slice of the process and handles it robustly over wireless networks.
Table 11-1: How Mobile Moments Turn Processes into Tasks
Processes on a PC Tasks on a mobile device
Assumption
An employee has minutes or hours to sit down and focus on the
application.
An employee has a few seconds to accomplish a task on the go and move on.
Design goal
Give an employee a comprehensive application and train her to use it.
Help an employee complete a single task as efficiently as possible with no training whatsoever.
Device
Desktop or laptop computer with a dedicated application using a
keyboard and mouse
Mobile device, often a small tablet or a large smartphone, with a touchscreen interface
Key
challenge
Knit together multiple systems to cover a complete process in a comprehensive application.
Expose the tasks in discrete APIs that can be stitched together to serve a worker’s immediate context.
Key
technology
Business process management (BPM) and middleware
BPM and middleware plus APIs and analytics