There are countless applications of mobile technology beyond customer service. As a matter of fact, the use of mobile technologies by company employees, rather than customers, is really the dominant application."
— Gabriele Piccoli, Editor
As you know if you have been reading Cutter Benchmark Review for some time, my academic research interest falls within two main domains: strategic information systems and customer service systems. To support the latter one, I just finished writing a research grant proposal for a major casino company. The proposal, titled "Customer Service System Portfolios: The Impact of Incremental Self-Service Channels," seeks to evaluate the effect on operational efficiency, on customer service quality, and, ultimately, on financial performance of an incremental service channel. In other words, say you are a major resort operator. Today you interact with your customers on property through multiple touch points (e.g., front desk staff, hosts, wait staff, concierge), through the call centers, through your Web site, and increasingly through several self-service, IT-enabled touch points, both on property and at a distance.
Featuring prominently in my research proposal is ... you guessed it, the mobile device in its many form factors and uses. Mobile devices are garnering an inordinate amount of interest for their many advantages: portability, anytime/anywhere access, personalization potential, and the like (our contributors describe these characteristics in depth so I will not). This attention to mobile technology is due in part to the many advantages and possibilities that the mobile platform affords, as well as the big publicity splashes of newer smartphones -- starting of course with the iPhone -- and the continuing trends of technology convergence and miniaturization. The grant proposal is aimed at doing research to understand how the emerging mobile platform can be used as a customer service instrument. But there are countless applications of mobile technology beyond customer service. As a matter of fact, the use of mobile technologies by company employees, rather than customers, is really the dominant application, as our survey confirms.
It is for this reason that we thought an issue of CBR on mobile technology, applications, and implementation challenges in an organizational setting would be welcomed by our audience, many of whom are facing these questions at this very moment.
Our academic contributor on this issue is Katia Passerini, Associate Professor and the Hurlburt Chair of Management Information Systems at the School of Management of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) -- USA. Katia is a former contributor to CBR, having written for our issue on e-learning (Vol. 7, No. 3), as well as an author for Cutter IT Journal. She was program chair for the Wireless Telecom Symposium in 2007 and serves on the board of several journals in this area. Our practicing contributor is Bhuvan Unhelkar. Bhuvan, a 26-year industry veteran, is the founding principal of MethodScience.com, a consulting and training firm based in Sydney, Australia. Bhuvan, a prolific writer, and contributor to other Cutter Consortium publications, is now focusing his interest on composite software development processes for mobile applications and the application of mobile technologies.
Katia's contribution provides a complete overview of the issues surrounding the mobile platforms. She begins her work with a broad definition of mobile technologies that is based on a framework addressing the hardware, applications, networks, and content components. She describes each of these components, and the surrounding issues, in detail. Katia then leverages her framework and definitions in the survey analysis. She focuses on the opportunities that this growing application of organizational technology -- which appears to withstand even the recent squeeze of the corporate budget — offers. She then analyzes the implementation and adoption challenges that organizations face, as well as the risks that mobile technologies engender with respect to the well-being of the mobile workforce. Katia concludes her piece by looking ahead and offers implementation guidelines. I also draw your attention to the sidebars in her piece that focus on the changing mobile landscape.
Bhuvan's contribution also incorporates a general definition of mobile technologies — as those that enable "anytime and anywhere" services. He introduces a business framework -- drawn from his earlier work — that helps guide the ensuing analysis of the survey data. In his framework, Bhuvan identifies the technical, economic, process, and social dimensions that are critical to the ability of an organization to capture the benefits and manage the threats introduced by the adoption of the mobile platform. Another valuable conceptual instrument to support the survey data analysis that Bhuvan introduces is the level of impact of the mobile technology under consideration: individual, organizational, and collaborative levels. With this analytical foundation established, Bhuvan studies the responses we received to the questionnaire, addressing first and foremost the characteristics of mobile technology. He then evaluates opportunities for mobile business and the associated risks, including privacy, security, and usability. Bhuvan's piece concludes with a very interesting discussion of how management should approach a transition to mobile technologies as well as some considerations about future likely developments. I draw your attention to Bhuvan's sections on implementation cases; I am sure at least one of them will address an area of immediate interest for your organization.
With last month's issue of CBR, we took a bit of a chance, peering into the future and into a trend that has yet to consolidate (digital data genesis). Conversely, this month's topic is perhaps overdue. The importance of the mobile platform as a tool in the arsenal of modern organizations is undeniable. What is less clear is how firms should incorporate the potential of mobile technologies into their IT and process infrastructure. That's the challenge I seek to contribute to solving with my work on customer service systems, and that's the challenge that our authors in this installment will help you meet in your own organization.
