BEST PRACTICES: IMPLEMENTING MOBILE WORKFORCE APPLICATIONS

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Implementing a mobile project is no small task. The ever-growing choice of devices available, the complexity of back-end integration and the rapid evolution of mobile technologies can make it look like a daunting challenge to the most experienced of project managers.

Since Appear helped pioneered the mobile workforce revolution back in 2001, we have been assisting major

corporations to pilot and roll-out their mobile solutions. From these assignments we have highlighted these key takeaways.

BEST PRACTICES:

IMPLEMENTING

MOBILE

WORKFORCE

APPLICATIONS

An Appear Whitepaper

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BEST P R ACT ICES: IM P LEME N TIN G MO BI LE WO RK FO RC E AP P LICATIO NS

1 INTRODUCTION

Implementing a mobile project is no small task. The ever-growing choice of devices available, the complexity of back-end integration coupled with the rapid evolution of mobile technologies can make it look like a daunting challenge to the most experienced of project managers.

Since Appear helped pioneered the mobile workforce revolution back in 2001, we have been assisting major corporations to pilot and roll-out their mobile solutions. From these assignments we have drawn these key take-aways.

A mobile project can be divided in 7 concurrent streams :

 Stream 1: Mobility Roadmap

 Stream 2: User Work-flow Analysis

 Stream 3: Mobile Platform Selection

 Stream 4: Device and Operating System Selection

 Stream 5: Back-end Integration

 Stream 6: Application Development

 Stream 7: Change Management

Each of these streams requires the involvement of specific resources and access to specific stakeholders in your organization.

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2 Mobility Roadmap

A mobile project needs to align with your corporate mobility strategy. If you don’t have one yet, don’t panic. There are simple rules to quickly build a successful mobility roadmap. It is very tempting to postpone your mobile project, or to keep iterating over your mobility strategy, as you wait for the next breakthrough mobile device out there, or for the “silver bullet” cross-platform application that will allow you to deliver your application on any mobile device. In the meantime, however, your competition is reaping the benefits from workforce mobilization and building new mobile channels with end customers, while you are writing reports.

 Rule number 1: it’s not about getting everything right from day one but about getting things started. We live in a world where technology is changing at an increasingly fast pace so you need to accept that the strategy you are designing now might become (at least) partly obsolete in 24 months. Don’t let this stop you from developing a long term mobility strategic vision, coupled with a short to mid-term tactical approach to your mobile projects. A well-thought out mobility roadmap will allow for any impending

technology changes and turn project iterations into learning opportunities.

 Rule number 2: be agile. In order to be able to respond to rapid technology changes and user requirement “churn”, your strategy has to be able to support rapid iterations. Forget the “waterfall” method with long development phases before acceptance and roll-out. Today’s enterprise mobility projects can be deployed in less than 6 months with the right tools, provided that you allow for rapid development iteration during the

development phase. However, you need to be as agile as your suppliers, which means understanding the basics of agile project management and agile software development methods.

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3 User Work-flow Analysis

Any mobile application (whether related to your workforce, your assets or your customers) is replacing or enhancing a previous workflow process. Your current “legacy” process needs to be very precisely documented before it can be turned into a “mobile data” process.

Good process analysis will allow you to develop a mobile application that answers your user needs precisely, without burdening them with unwanted functions. A good tip is to involve your super users (real end users) early, without relying solely on your business analysts to relay user requirements to the suppliers. Involving superusers early in the requirement specification phase has several benefits. First, it creates a high sense of commitment from these end-users, who will then be your “eyes and ears” on the field when the system is implemented. Secondly, it allows the suppliers to build user “stories”, which are central to agile development methodology. User stories are descriptions written in the everyday or business language of the end user that captures what the user wants to achieve. User stories are a quick way of handling user requirements, which eliminate the need for elaborating associated formal documents and the overloaded administrative tasks related to maintaining them. The intention of the user story is to be able to respond faster to ever changing real-world requirements, thus incurring less overheads.

Good process analysis allows you to build ROI models based on the optimization of those workflows, in order to justify the cost of your project. Often, mobile projects fail to deliver on the expectations of C-Level management, because they have been focusing on the wrong part of the processes. Let’s take the example of an aircraft turnaround coordinator wanting to access the status of the aircraft turnaround process in real time from a mobile device. If the goal of the mobile project is to allow the turnaround coordinator to manage more than one flight at a time, the ROI model will be very weak, as the requirement from a dedicated coordinator to manage more than one flight only occurs at peak hours during the day. If the goal of the mobile project is, on the other hand, to precisely track what operations are taking place around the aircraft, in order to prevent any time breach, then the ROI is much stronger as the mobile solution will allow the aircraft to leave on time, help ground handlers to match their SLAs with the airline, and support the accurate billing of ground service activities to the airline.

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4 Mobile Platform Selection

Mobile Device Management Platforms (MDMs) and Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAPs) are “must have” components of scalable, future-proof mobile solutions. They provide one set of tools for managing applications, users and devices, allowing the number of users and applications to grow without increasing the system management overhead. They also allow companies to build integrated/composite mobile applications for better

operational workflows across the enterprise, as the mobile applications are no longer locked in “operational silos”.

Selecting a platform can be confusing as there are many products on the market, all offering very different capabilities. Some platforms are more focused on managing the devices (staging, monitoring, troubleshooting) while other platforms come with an integrated development studio to accelerate your mobile application development. Your choice must be driven by the understanding of your current and future needs. You may only need device management now, but equally you know you will need application development support once you start to add new functions to your initial deployment. Platforms who combine modular MDM and MEAP capabilities make your deployment future-proof and scalable.

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5 Device/OS Selection

With the rise of powerful Smartphones and Tablets, the sensing capability of these devices (GPS, NFC, accelerometer, compass, etc.), and the availability of cheap high bandwidth connectivity (3G and now 4G/LTE), a new range of advanced mobile applications are coming to market.

So, which device and operating system should you choose to support? It is tempting to “go with the flow” and select the most popular devices and operating systems. If you are

developing a consumer application, this is certainly a reasonable approach, as you can cover a significant part of your target market by developing applications tailored to the 2-3 top operating systems.

But what if you are planning to widely share out devices to your workforce? Other issues come into play then, such as your capability to manage these devices (staging, monitoring, troubleshooting, etc.). Most consumer devices and operating systems have very limited device management functions and a very short lifecycle, which can lead to a higher cost of ownership compared to enterprise-grade devices, even if your initial outlay is lower at first. In fact, the total cost of ownership (TCO) has little to do with the hardware cost itself. It is mostly impacted by the loss of productivity related to a malfunctioning or out-of-service device. So, your choice of device and OS has to be directly related to the usage model. Will the devices be shared or personal? Will they be used in rough environments? How much battery capacity do you need to support your planned applications for the maximum duration of a shift? What is your planned device lifecycle?

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6 Back-end Integration

The integration of the mobile solution with your existing back-end is often believed to be a trivial exercise. Some ERP suppliers might even tell you that you don’t need mobile experts to build a mobile extension to their back-end system. A simple web portal will do the trick. Our advice is: don’t believe them. We have seen our share of projects fail due to poor user experience.

Take the mobile/web portal approach for example.

Firstly, it assumes that your users are always connected, or ready to accept a loss of

connectivity. While this may be true for a simple consumer app, it certainly is not the case for a mission-critical system used by a frontline worker. Often, the device will lose connectivity while roaming between networks and locations, the mobile function needs to be available in an offline mode (i.e. in effect, cached locally in the device). We call this OCC (occasionally connected computing). Your mobile platform needs to be able to support it.

Secondly, it adopts the “desktop screen shrinking” approach. Mobile web designers will try to squeeze the ERP interface with smaller buttons and scrolling bars, to be able to fit all the functions originally accessible in the desktop web console. This approach does not work at all with frontline workers, who are focusing on the task at hand, who have no time to search and scroll through the interface.

Successful integration cases rely on the use of a common platform to connect with your back-end systems, sometimes called EAI – enterprise application integration layer, or ESB – enterprise service bus. This middleware layer aggregates data from your back-end systems and intelligently distributes it in the right format to the mobile devices.

In this approach, context becomes extremely important. Based on the precise understanding of the user situation (location, profile, workflow status, time, etc.), the mobile interface should actively display the most relevant information on the user devices.

So, true integration with a back-end system must take into account the specificities of a mobile user whilst also providing mechanisms for offline caching in the device, opportunistic data synchronization and context-aware information push. This is done via the mobile platform (MEAP) described in stream 3.

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7 Application Development

Developing a mobile application is often believed to be a trivial task. The Apple App Store hit 10 billion downloads in early 2011, and mobile application developers are working in every “garage”. So why would you outsource your mobile application development to a specialized company while your next door neighbour can develop it for you, at a fraction of the cost? Well, think twice. There are over 350,000 apps available on the Apple App Store, but only a fraction of those have been downloaded more than 10,000 times. Why? Ergonomics. Most applications are poorly designed and fail to deliver on basic requirements such as user-friendliness, response time, look and feel. So when it comes to mobilizing your workforce or deploying an impactful consumer application, you have to work with the best.

A good mobile application needs to have a well-designed UI (user interface) and be responsive. An additional challenge is to provide good response times for users who often have to switch between applications. This requires innovative technologies such as “in process” applications and resource sharing between applications.

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8 Change Management

In the end, your mobile project results are only as good as the satisfaction of your end users. In other words, you can design the most amazing mobile application ever, but if your target users (employees or customers) don’t use it, your project will be a failure.

Assuming that you have followed the advice described on stream 5 (back-end integration) and 6 (mobile app development), you now have a user-friendly, highly usable application ready to be deployed. Now, you also need to ensure that your target users change the way they access information and convert to the “new way of doing things”: your mobile application.

Change management processes are complex to put in place and rely on specific groups of “super users”. In a consumer application roll-out, these will be the early adopters and trendsetters, who will pick up your application and publicize it in blogs and social media. In a workforce application roll-out, you need to recruit these super users and involve them at a very early stage (when you are designing the application), so that they can contribute to the development process and the training programs, and ultimately, support your

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9 How can we help?

Stream 1: Mobility Roadmap - At Appear, we benchmark well known organizations who have successfully developed their corporate mobility strategy and we organize field visits for you. We analyze your implementation strategy, starting from the short-term (“as is”) to long-term (“to be”), and we help you to define mobile projects that will support you along the way. Appear IQ offers a number of configurable mobile apps focusing on the needs of mobile workers in industries such as transportation, logistics, field service or construction. Join the app revolution at www.appearshowroom.com

Stream 2: User Work-flow Analysis - At Appear, we use industry process experts, working hand in hand with your business analysts and your end users in order to exactly define their needs and to validate the cost/benefit ratio of your mobile solution.

Stream 3: Mobile Platform Selection - Appear IQ is a cloud-based mobile enterprise solution combining a cross-platform development environment (to support BYOD models), a context-aware mobility platform or MEAP (to push updates, add/remove applications and change distribution criteria based on the precise context of your employees) and a vertical application store (your own private app store to control the lifecycle and distribution of your

applications).

Stream 4: Device /OS Selection - At Appear, we routinely provide device selection guidelines to our clients, based on our experiences of multiple industries. Our team of hardware experts can identify the best solution for you, be it rugged, semi-rugged or non-rugged. We have experience of various form factors, including personal mobile radios, smartphones, tablets, MIDs (mobile internet devices), MCAs (mobile clinical assistants) or in-vehicle devices, amongst others.

Stream 5: Back-end Integration – The Appear IQ platform simplifies the software integration and forms the backbone of any enterprise mobility project. For large scale integration projects in different industries Appear works with a network of integration partners.

Stream 6: Application Development - At Appear, we have proven that a 10% cost increase focusing on usability improvement can drive an 80% uptake of the application. You can hire our experts to work on the UI design of your mobile application or leverage the power of our MEAP platform to streamline your own application development.

Stream 7: Change Management - The Appear team has proven experience of conducting change management processes for large organizations. Examples include the design of effective training materials, creation of incentive campaigns to foster mobile technology adoption and processes for management of “super user teams”

Appear Networks Systems AB, Kista Science Tower, 164 51 Kista, Sweden

Phone: +46(0)854591370 Web: www.appearnetworks.com