Cost or Value?

It never seems to matter these days. Whenever you have a conversation about mobile you will invariably end up talking about BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and COPE (Corporate Owned Personally Enabled) programs. It can turn into a debate about which is better, which one is easier to support, or which one invariably costs more. This then turns into a cost exercise. One person or another will form a team to study the costs associated with mobile and what can be done to bring those down. They’re all doing it wrong.

The goal of any mobile program is to enable your business to meet its goals by enabling your users. You are looking to improve business processes by reinventing old ones and creating brand new ones that allow your business to grow by using mobile technology. You are trying to provide your users with the right tools, which means the right device matched with the right app, to allow them to focus on their own needs to get whatever task they need done when and where they need to do it (FUN principle). You spend your effort trying to make your workforce more flexible and agile while increasing their productivity and efficiency. Then, what do you do, you decide it’s a cost center. You are providing mobile technology at some price and you look for ways to lower those costs.

The problem with doing things this way is that no matter how good your intentions are you end up lowering expectations and taking shortcuts in an effort to save a few dollars. You rationalize that it’s okay if your users can only use one type of device because it’s cheaper to buy from only one device maker. There might be an app that does a better job and allows them to work a little more flexibly but it costs twice as much as this one, which is adequate. You begin to make compromises. These compromises add up and end up taking you back to the land of legacy thinking. It’s quite simply the wrong approach.

This is not to say that cost doesn’t matter but what if you were to look at it a little differently. When you look at your mobile program, concentrate on the value you derive by enabling your users. Figure out how much more productive they become. Calculate how much more agile are you as a company. Stop looking at mobile as a cost center and start looking at the value it provides.

The quest is for the company to meet its business goals. These can be hard numbers like the number of sales, or repeat sales. It can be how many times you have to service a product or how easy it is to acquire new business. Whatever these goals are, you have to see how mobility helps you meet them.

You may find that your service arena is more responsive to your customers because they have their devices on them all the time. It may be easier to check something while you are out in the field on a simple hand held device rather than walking back into the office to open the manual on a computer. You may be able to respond quicker because the information arrives faster.

Let’s take an insurance adjuster. 15 years ago (really only a few years ago), if you had a car accident, you would call the adjuster and make an appointment for them to inspect the damage to your car. They would come out, take some pictures and start a draft report and then head back to the office. They would do some research on your car, how old it was, where the damage was and then let you know what repairs you were eligible for or else, if you were lucky they would cut you a check. Today they come out with their mobile device, take pictures, upload them while standing with you; check out repair costs and in many cases cut you a check in the same visit. It also takes them a quarter of the amount of time and they can see more clients in a day. What is the value to that insurance company of streamlining the process?

The same thing can happen on a manufacturing line. You may have a dozen machines stamping out pieces and putting them together. You visit the machine once an hour and on the clipboard attached to the machine, you right down all the relevant statistics on how it’s doing. At the end of the shift, you collect all the paperwork and put it into a computer. If there was a problem, you may not realize it until the end of the day when all the data gets crunched. On the other hand, you can do the same thing with a tablet that you walk around with. All the relevant information is processed as you enter it. You can detect issues earlier and reduce the amount of time you actually spend doing a task. Eventually, these machines will report themselves and it will all be done automatically while you spend your time working on something else. How much is that worth to the business?

We, as a community, need to stop looking at everything as a cost center which we have to cut to bare bones and instead need to look at the value we derive from enabling our users and our business. It may not be a simple ROI equation, but it needs to stop being just a line in the budget. Learn to change your thinking from cost to value and in the long run, your business will be much happier and more successful.