The future of mobility for enterprises
eir Business hosted a round table discussion on how the growth of mobile connectivity has impacted on business and how senior managers can effectively implement a mobile strategy.
How has the explosive growth in mobile impacted your business?
Tom Long
We have certainly seen the explosive growth in mobile. Every two years CISCO does a ‘mobile index’ and in 2014 there was 74 per cent growth in mobile traffic. We see strong annual growth of 53 per cent until 2020, which will equate to 30 EB [Exabytes] of data. This has resulted in a bigger spend by our customers on WiFi access technology. In 2013, 14 per cent of the access spend in the enterprise market in Ireland was on wireless and last year that doubled to 28 per cent. Mobile is a key part of our growth strategy.
David Cadenhead
Mobile is enabling our business to be more effective both on the customer-facing side and in internal operations. Everyone has flown and has had a mobile experience with mobile boarding cards and interactivity throughout your journey. Our research shows that airline ticket bookings through digital channels will exceed 50 per cent this year, mostly with smart phones and then secondly tablets. On the internal side we have introduced things such as an electronic flight bag for all our pilots for carrying out their duties more effectively, and it also allows the deployment of our services in a much shorter time.
John Tuohy
The explosive growth in mobile has impacted greatly on our business which now directly delivers 14 million parcels to customers each year and another 2 million via our Parcel Motel. The biggest impact has been the move to online shopping. In quarter 1 2015, 18 per cent of online shopping was online and in 2016 that has grown to 34 per cent. Online retail is now all about the omni-channel which includes mobile devices. That is changing the nature of our business. We were always a B2B business and now we are being rapidly dragged into the B2C space. Our mobile phone delivery business reflects this change. Previously we delivered mobile phones in volume to stores and now we have smaller volumes delivered directly to customers.
Bill Archer
Mobile is critical to our business and it has radically shifted our business model. Our capital investment programme is now geared towards enhancing our broadband footprint and a substantial amount of broadband investment is around mobile and ensuring our coverage. Our performance on the asset base is exceptional and is second to none. It is a relentless quest to ensure quality and performance levels and the engineering and network operation challenges that result from that are quite different than in the past.
In terms of facing our customers, our whole way of going to market is being fundamentally reshaped. We used to be a company that brought you a product and let you get on with it. In the mobile world, where mobile is embedded in a customer’s business process, there is an expectation to stitch together our network and a device with some form of application or service so that the customer can deploy this technology to change the way they work. That means as a provider we need to bring integrated capabilities and solutions to customers. The conversations at the front end of an engagement have changed and it is now about how mobility will disrupt the way they function today and make it better.
Tim Hynes
There has been a huge shift in how mobile devices have become central in everyone’s life. There has been a fundamental shift in banking and now 90 per cent of interactions with customers are not face to face but electronic and mostly on a mobile device. Traditional banking was centred around the branch. Now all our services have to be centred around the customer. This requires the organisation to develop new muscles. We have put a lot of effort into customer experience design – how do we understand our customer journeys and how do we imagine any new customer journey enabled through devices? We now have the opportunity to be in our customer’s hand any time day or night rather than just when the branches are open.
Customers want new services and not just being able to check their balances. They want to be able to apply for a loan from their phone. This has had an impact on the business behind the scenes. A simple example is where we had to redesign the bereavement process when a customer passes away. The new process is quite different from when we had only physical branches.
We also have to develop new muscles that help us to recognise new customer requirements. I do a lot of travel and it got to the point that I wouldn’t travel with an airline unless they had an application that allowed me to check in and do everything on my phone. It is the same with banking.
Zelia Madigan
Mobile has been a massive development for us as providers of the mobile infrastructure for the networks. It has meant a big shift in how we think and innovate. Now that there is such demand on mobile coverage everywhere we have to be innovative in design with particular focus on sustainability. This means designing products that require less power but can provide better capability such as capacity and throughput (Mb/s). Other considerations include accessibility, security, governance, and automation. To consider all of these aspects and to develop products and services with speed we have partnered and acquired companies with specific expertise when required.
Mobile technology will have a very positive impact on sustainability, with the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT) enabling driverless cars, connected transport and remote traffic control to name but a few. This is not futuristic. It can be done today and we are developing future technologies, 5G, to enhance mobile connectivity further to enable faster communication for these mission critical type applications.
As the technology moves from 4G to 5G, quality of service and in particular the speed of response is key for IoT, enabling connectivity faster and to facilitate more automation, such as remote surgery. Mobile has been good for growth and will continue to aid businesses to grow.
Ronan Murphy
Mobile created our business. A broad range of businesses use our services such as airlines, government departments and local government. We are a small Irish company of 32 people and yet we have done projects globally with financial services providers with 35,000 users. We see mobile continuing to gather momentum and if anything it is moving faster than we ever thought. As a business we are constantly having to pivot such as moving away from one partner to becoming vendor agnostic. Mobile created our business and it is at the core of everything we do.
What are the main elements of a mobile strategy?
Tom Long
We speak to a lot of customers across many different segments and the first thing we do regarding a mobile strategy is to understand the business outcome and the impact mobile will have on the business. It normally falls into three different areas: optimising business processes; enhancing the customer experience; or improving the workforce. A strong strategy will impact on more than one area. One of the main elements is the application, either trying to improve the internal workforce experience or the external customer experience. Where do these applications reside? and what sort if user interfaces will be used?
Ronan Murphy
We always focus on two things: application success and user experience. The best example of that is Uber. They decided they wanted to bring in an application in essence to link people to taxis. Although they spent a lot of money developing the platform it was all about the user experience. They spent $7.8 million developing the application, which was a lot of money at the time and a lot of people questioned that. But it was a very good user experience. They started with 340 users and within six months had 600,000.
Security is also an important part of getting to mobile first. It can be very complex, particularly in highly regulated businesses with lots of compliance issues. In the financial services sector both financial regulators and auditors are now looking at how you treat mobile content and it is something that a lot of people haven’t thought through. Risk management around apps is becoming an increasingly important part of our business.
Tim Hynes
We look at the best of what is happening across the world. I partner closely with our chief digital officer and we have agreed our ambition: by the end of 2018 AIB will be recognised as having the best technology function of any bank in Europe and mobile is central to that. I think that reflects the important thing about any strategy: you have to be bold. It is very easy to follow. It is about understanding the components and the engine behind it, including data with all its regulatory constraints. It is also about moving to the cloud, which no bank has done yet. People are also an important part of any strategy as you have got to be able to build quickly. Therefore, you need more people with a design mentality.
Bill Archer
It starts with understanding the business process and how mobile is going to disrupt that. You also need to look at how introducing mobile will change the way your people work and how they interact with customers. Finally, IT needs to ensure it is reliable, secure and compliant, and can adapt to further change. If you get these things right you are on the right path – I look around the table and I see really innovative things happening at City Jet, AIB and Nightline.
What are your customers’ expectations in terms of mobile capability and how can you meet this demand?
David Cadenhead
We have to interact with our customers in the way they expect us to. This goes for buying a ticket and how we interact with them throughout their journey: check-in, transit through the airport etc. Customer expectations are continually growing and we have to work hard to keep ahead of them.
John Tuohy
Online shopping through mobile devices is very rapidly changing the landscape of our industry and how it works. Consumers want more choices in terms of where they want the delivery and we developed a system last year called Parcel Pilot whereby we notify the consumer in advance that the parcel is on the way and they can then make choices about rescheduling the delivery or diverting it to their work address or to a parcel hotel. It is about picking up the communications with the consumer from the retailer and dealing with the customer’s choice. For us it will mean delivering the parcel first time out at a time and place where the consumer wants it. It is very challenging to try and hit such a moving target but that is where the market is going.
Bill Archer
The innovation dimension around new capabilities to take to the market is moving quickly outside the remit of a traditional network provider. Innovation is now about converging fixed and mobile capabilities together and creating services that reside in our network that allow customers to use mobile and other networking technologies to be more efficient and a higher utility. It is about integrating eir services with third party content to bring integrated capabilities to customers.
The really exciting stuff downstream of that – which we are thinking hard about – is the fact that everything is going to be connected, whether that is John’s vehicles, David’s Aircraft or Tim’s ATMs, to an intelligent system. We are deeply immersed in thinking about how our role in that develops.
Tim Hynes
Customers expect to be able to do all their business with the bank through the channel of their choice. A good number of branches have been transformed into the modern branch with people out on the floor. Sometimes people want to talk to a person particularly for the bigger transactions such as mortgages. But the mobile strategy is still key. What are you going to put into the hands of those staff to support them? There is an ‘instant’ component to mobile and if it is not instant it has to be quick, particularly regarding customer expectations.
Ronan Murphy
It is really about meeting customer requirements via a mobile device. Most of the discussion so far has focused on the private sector but there are big changes in the public sector, particularly in health. We are working in the UK on a health project around the digital availability of prescriptions. It is a locked down tablet device in a pharmacy and you walk in and give your PIN and they can recall your prescription from a secure cloud location. It hasn’t happened here due to a lack of investment in health and education.
Zelia Madigan
Our customers want to have the best mobile customer experience for their customer. Understanding individual Operator customer’s specific mobile connectivity needs can be a challenge. As this can vary greatly, depending on what is most important for them as an individual or for their business. To aid understanding our customers need access, in real time, to data from their networks to understand what is important to their customers. To continuously understand we have developed tools and invested in consumer labs to know what will be important to customers in the future and using those insights to design the networks for the future to ensure the best customer experience.
What are the challenges and opportunities for mobilising your workforce?
John Tuohy
We are running a pilot as a ‘premium service’ in the evenings and weekends while people are at home. But the nature of that type of service, and pronounced seasonality with online shopping, means we are hiring more part-time staff. Their knowledge will not be as good as the traditional full-time driver. This means we have to simplify the process by putting a tablet device in the van that gives them turn by turn directions for the delivery. Last year we worked with eir to launch a Samsung tablet device that optimises the route and suggests to the driver the best order to do the route and it also notifies the consumer of an ETA, giving them a two-hour window. It also takes the expertise out of driving the van. We still have a lot to do, as in Ireland we have just introduced Eircodes which we will use as a basic building block for the future.
Tim Hynes
We are moving to give customers a truly digital experience and to deliver all our services through the device of the customer’s choice. This means that the role of our people in the branches is changing. We are changing the shape of the branches so that people come out from behind the counter and engage with the customer in a different way.
Ronan Murphy
Within some sectors it is about talent acquisition. Young people coming into the workforce require the technology and they want to use the devices they are comfortable with.
Tom Long
Work is no longer a place but something people do. We are in a new world where a key component of competitive advantage is having a connected and engaged workforce. This can be hard to make a tangible business case for but it is now increasingly important.
David Cadenhead
We deployed an electronic flight bag platform which completely changed the way our pilots work. The traditional flight bag was full of documentation: charts and manuals. We worked with CWSI and eir along with key software providers to make this into a digital platform. It has made document distribution and control much easier. It has also enabled a key part of business growth within CityJet. Earlier this year we started a wet lease operation for Scandinavian Airlines, where we provide the aircraft, the crew and maintenance and engineering activity across Scandinavia to 49 different airport destinations. The time to deploy this service was greatly reduced by not having to set up additional crew and logistical facilities. The pilots’ duty time is also improved as in many instances they can go straight to the aircraft. It has made the work experience much better for our pilots and also enabled the organisation to grow.
Zelia Madigan
The workforce flexibility has brought greater diversity to all our organisations, which in turn brings greater creativity and innovation. I travelled a lot myself last year and did a role that should have been based in the UK but I was able to base myself in Ireland. The flexibility means that people in the Irish operation can now take on senior roles within the company that would have been previously based in Scandinavia.
What one issue should senior managers focus on in deploying a mobile strategy across their organisation?
Ronan Murphy
Understand where you are and where you want to be. We undertake a mobility maturity analysis with clients and then look at where they want to go in terms of mobility. Research from Gartner shows that 62 per cent of mobile projects fail. To avoid failure, it is critical to have cross-functionality across the business and not just leave it to the IT department.
Zelia Madigan
Understanding the people aspect – how the employees will use mobile connectivity, how it will help you attract and retain the best talent. It is about understanding your customers and also your customers’ customers and how it will benefit them and then in turn your business. These are key elements to consider when defining your mobile strategy.
Tim Hynes
You can’t take the traditional IT approach. You need people with a design mind set. I would put the design experience for employees and customers at the centre of any strategy.
On the product side I would keep it simple. For example, I was recently in San Francisco and forgot to tell my debit card provider (AIB) I was abroad. When I went to use my card the system in Ireland recognised I was in a place I’m not normally in and the simple solution was to send me a text – it doesn’t always have to be clever and sexy. Keep it as simple as it needs to be.
Bill Archer
Pick the right partner. These are rapidly evolving areas in terms of business transformation and the new introduction of technology requires expertise, resources and assets and content – services that can be embedded in your mobile environment to create the type of change you are seeking. Part of creating success is making the right choice in terms of who your partners are to help you realise those objectives.
John Tuohy
To be very clear about the business process. Very often the mobile strategy will be done together with the automation of business processes and the first thing is to understand the process you are trying to automate because it is very easy to automate bad processes. You need to start with the customer and work back and then take the steps out that are not necessary and you will end up with a very good mobile experience.
David Cadenhead
A lot of it is about identifying the overall business strategy. Increasingly the IT side of the business needs to work more closely with the customer facing side of the business to identify what we are trying to achieve with the mobile strategy. It is not about ticking a box to say we have a mobile app, it is trying to achieve real business objectives around how customers engage with the organisation. In deploying it, depending on the scale, it makes sense to engage with partners like eir and CWSI, who are at the coalface of the technology and that will accelerate your time to market.
Tom Long
All of the above and the one element I would add is to understand the risk and how to address it before you deploy the technology. For a lot of CIOs the top concern is risk – risk around data loss prevention, malware and reliability. One of the aspects of going mobile is that your business is going to become reliant on the mobile technology you are deploying. But you have to embrace a mobile strategy as it is a case of disrupt or be disrupted.
