The agility of mobility: Spend more, not less, to unleash employee potential during hard times

It's human nature to hunker down before a storm hits. Go deep, batten down the hatches behind you and wait it out. Immediate survival is all that matters. You'll figure out the long-term stuff when the storm passes and you re-emerge to assess the damage. It's easy to see how our storm-battered economy is prompting many companies to follow a similar path. After all, conventional wisdom dictates that uncertain times drive conservative business behaviours. When the world is swirling around you, the last thing you really want to be doing is betting the farm on some new technology, process, product or service. You'd rather minimize risk and cost by focusing on what you know, holding on to what you can, and leaving the rest for another day. I'd like to argue that conventional wisdom may have gotten it wrong this time out. These are not conventional times, and traditional cost containment strategies may, in some cases, do more harm than good by cutting the wrong thing. Many companies are in trouble precisely because their organizational and operational structures weren't agile enough to prepare them for a serious downturn. They spent untold amounts of money and time on technologies and processes that simply couldn't adapt when the world slowed down around them. By cutting investments that can raise organizational agility, they risk dooming themselves further. As an example, let's look at investments in mobile technology. Shares in Canada's major telecommunications carriers are under siege these days because wary investors are worried about flatlining subscriber rates. The reason? Folks stop spending on gadgets when their bottom lines are threatened. It makes eminent sense, after all: If you're bleeding cash, your very survival depends on your ability to cut costs. And fast. But what costs should you cut? Are some more sacrosanct that others? Should you even be looking at mobility as a pure cost? Better yet, should you still be buying high-end toys like iPhones and BlackBerrys as you're laying off staff and closing offices? Call me a heretic, but the right answer here for the average small- to mid-sized business is yes. And while we're at it, let's stop calling them toys. Or gadgets. And let's stop looking at them as purely devices. Now more than ever, mobile technology underpins your organization's ability to roll with the punches, survive the downturn and emerge stronger than your competition. Old style sales-driven organizations use conventional processes to track and support road warriors. Dispatchers connect them to office resources. Paperwork gets done back at the office. Mobile technology supercharges your sales people, allowing them to process orders in real-time wherever they are. Paperwork doesn't wait until they get back to the office. Indeed, paper is no longer part of the equation. And those dispatchers? Freed up from phone duty to do more value-added work. Your people spend more time selling more deeply to more clients. You spend less money and time supporting them. Your administrative investments are reduced. All because you deployed a few so-called gadgets. Of course, it costs money to save money. Devices aren't free. Nor is connectivity, back-end infrastructure and the training to make it all work together seamlessly. But rapid advances in mobile solutions are gradually bringing down up-front capital investment requirements. Subscription-based applications simplify deployment and support, and allow your IT department to quickly roll out sophisticated solutions without necessarily requiring the organization to own any of the underlying technology . The average SMB IT team is already overwhelmed with too many requests and not enough resources to cover them all. Mobile subscription-based services let you have your cake and eat it, too, which is important. Because as your competitors emerge from their own self-imposed hibernation, they, too, will be looking for ways to inexpensively boost organizational capability. So if you're not already investing in mobile-based agility, bet your next quarterly statement that someone else is. Does this mean that everyone gets an iPhone? Absolutely not. Like any investment in technology, you need to calculate the ROI, make the business case and understand the long-term impact of such a solution not only on your bottom line, but also on the very way your business evolves. Mobility will change your people and your processes, and you can't proceed with deployment until you understand how it will all play out. But if you take the time to figure out the costs and the benefits, you'll set the stage for a company that more easily scales up - or down - to meet changing business needs, a company that isn't locked into fixed infrastructure, a company whose employees are as productive in a suburban coffee shop or on a customer's factory floor as they are in a head office cubicle. Most organizations - especially in the SMB space - may still be gun-shy about spending more on mobility. The question remains whether they can afford not to.

The agility of mobility: Spend more, not less, to unleash employee potential during hard times

News | February 1, 2009

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