Picture a construction company that equips fifteen field engineers with corporate mobile phones. Management calls this ‘mobilising the field,’ yet the engineers use these devices only to call each other and report back to the central office. Daily site logs are still written on paper and brought in at the end of the day; material orders go out by fax; and project tracking lives in a spreadsheet on the project manager’s desktop. The devices exist. The strategy does not. This picture will feel familiar to many mid-sized Turkish companies.
A mobile business strategy is a framework that defines which business processes can be carried out in the field, away from the office, and specifies how that should happen. Without this framework, every device purchased remains little more than a portable telephone. The real value of going mobile lies in enabling a worker to do in the field what was previously only possible at a desk: accessing customer records, checking order status, submitting an end-of-day report. Each of these capabilities requires a deliberate decision in advance about which data reaches which employee and how that data travels between the field and the office.
The most visible problem with device investment that has no strategy behind it is a usage gap. Employees receive phones but are never told what to do with them. Before long, two parallel communication channels form inside the company: formal processes continue through the old routes, while the mobile phones are reserved for emergencies. The manager asks why productivity has not improved despite the investment; the answer is usually straightforward. The device was positioned as an accessory rather than as a component of a defined process.
Consider a distribution company whose field sales representatives use mobile phones to track customer visits. If these representatives call the central office verbally after each visit, a colleague at headquarters must re-enter that information into the system. The same data is processed twice, the risk of error doubles, and time is lost at both ends. Had a working method been defined that allowed the representative to enter data directly in the field, in a format compatible with the office system, this loop could have been broken. That does not necessarily require expensive software; a clear definition of the process alone makes a significant difference.
The second critical component of a mobile business strategy is defining access boundaries. Which employee can reach which data, under what conditions is that access valid, and how is data security maintained? Without answers to these questions established in advance, companies tend to fall into one of two traps: either they open everything to everyone and lose control, or they restrict access so tightly that employees in the field cannot reach any useful information. Many Turkish SMEs fall into the second trap. Driven by a concern to ‘keep things secure,’ they lock the system down so thoroughly that a field worker cannot accomplish anything meaningful while away from the office.
On the question of measurement, tracking the return on a mobile device investment requires indicators that are defined from the very beginning. How many visits were completed? How many orders were entered in the field? Did the volume of repeated calls to headquarters decrease? If these questions are not monitored, there is no way to know whether the investment is working. In practice, many companies skip this step entirely. They distribute devices, conclude six months later that nothing has changed, and write off the mobilisation effort as a failure. What actually failed was not mobilisation itself but the decision to launch it without a plan for measuring outcomes.
As an SME manager considering mobile device investment, three questions need clear answers before any purchase is made. Which business process can be completed in the field, and what does that gain for the company? What data is needed to support that process, and how can access to it be provided securely? And finally, which indicator will be used to track whether the investment is paying off? If these questions cannot be answered with confidence, it is wiser to postpone the hardware purchase and define the process first. Because without a strategy behind them, distributed devices tend to become expensive phones that employees carry in their pockets and nothing more.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on May 29, 2006 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.