I spent 20+ years in the field. I started as a service technician repairing communications equipment in the public safety space. As I am prone to say, “I spent 20 years twisting screws, managing teams that twisted screws and running a QA department that set policy on which screws to twist and how hard to twist them.”  Needless to say, I was in the trenches in a customer facing role and my customers were in the public safety space. For these folks their communications gear was their lifeline and it had to work.

As part of this experience I developed a knack for a near 100% first time fix rate. The fact that I usually stole parts from my own equipment to get the customer back up and operating usually frustrated my dispatcher to no end but the customer was working and that was all that mattered. The upside was not listening to my dispatcher whine for a few hours so it was a win-win situation as far as I was concerned.

During those days in the field I developed excellent troubleshooting skills, the ability to think on my feet, self reliance and an encouraging way of interacting with customers under incredibly stressful situations. There is nothing worse than being woken by the phone ringing at 3 am to a police Watch Commander screaming at you because he can’t contact his officers in the field. Trust me on thist one. They have no sense of humor at that point and ‘fix it yesterday’ is a term they use freely.

My goal in the field, whether it was for me or for the teams I managed, was always the same; how can I be more effective at what I do? There’s no easy answer but the best evidence is out there with your field staff. I will warn you though asking this question will garner the wrath of your mobile workers in a nanosecond if the question is not asked correctly. Pitchforks and torches come to mind.

You never ask a mobile worker how they can be more efficient.

What they will hear is “how much more blood can I squeeze out of this turnip”. Efficient translates to more work. Like the old trick of how many college kids can you cram into a Volkswagen, it may be efficient but it may also be worthless.

Efficiency is more about schedule manipulation than empowering your people to be more successful. Don’t get me wrong, you have to be efficient to make money and stay in business but simply focusing on getting more done in a shorter period of time may make your situation worse. Here’s an example.

An outbound call center that provided up-sell information to existing customers had an “efficiency expert” come and evaluate their processes. Using “industry standard measurements” this expert determined that if the rep could not convince the customer to move to the next step within five minutes they should hang up and move on to the next prospect. On the surface this seems like it might be reasonable. They implemented the change immediately without question (or asking their reps what they thought). After all, we paid this expert a lot of money to take advantage of his experience and help us with best practices.

The result was a disaster.

First call closure rates dropped to single digits, outbound call volume doubled and sales plummeted. In a panic the managers expanded operating hours and took out their stop watches to make sure the reps were following the new directive to the second. No matter what they did things only got worse. Eventually somebody asked why. The answer was very simple but somehow it was overlooked.

In their enthusiastic effort to match industry best practices they neglected to determine how long it took to actually position the new offer with the customer. Some minor analysis revealed that even the most savvy customer talking with the best rep required more than seven minutes of explanation to be able to understand the complex offering well enough to move to the next phase (buy or not). Unfortunately the reps were given only five minutes to cut and run and the few that were taking longer (and being more successful) were being disciplined for not adhering to company policy.

I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t anybody look at this BEFORE they paid some idiot (or expert) to tell them something else? Because critical analysis of what we do is usually left to some unbiased outsider when we have a wealth of information and real experts right at our fingertips.

Asking the reps how they could have been more effective would have been the first place to start.

The reps reported that (prior to the enlightened experts changes) much of the resistance they ran into was related to the complexity of pricing and trying to determine the customer’s actual cost based on the discount formula they had been provided. In many cases the rep used their personal relationship with the customer to get them to buy. This shows how a trusted advisor relationship can help even when the support systems don’t make their jobs easy. Unfortunately the initial focus was on efficiency, not effectiveness so this nugget of wisdom was missed. A simpler pricing structure would have made them more effective and might have lead to more sales.

It’s the same with your mobile workers. Before we embark on some massive efficiency exercise we would do well to ask the field team what they think would make them more effective. Do they need more, less or different inventory in their trucks? Do they need different tools or equipment? Are we saddling them with documentation requirements that provide no added value? Can we streamline the process of data collection? Can any of this be pushed back to the office and cleaned up with a less expensive resource?

I’m not saying there’s no opportunity to be more efficient but with effectiveness comes efficiency, happy employees and happy customers. Can the same be said with just efficiency? You be the judge.

I was out for a run the other day at the Jersey Shore. Near the end of the run, I started to hear a number of sirens in the distance, and they were coming closer. I then realized that I was smelling smoke. I turned a corner and saw a house with smoke billowing out of the windows. Instant activity enveloped the street. Fortunately, there was nobody home and the fire was extinguished without incident and no one was hurt.

The coordination of the emergency services crews was impressive. When I first arrived, there were just 2 police officers stopping traffic and securing the area. Within minutes there were fire trucks from Surf City and Ship Bottom, followed by the Beach Haven ambulance squad and other emergency service crews from other towns. One fire truck came around the corner dropping the fire hose as it passed. A fireman jumped off the truck and secured the hose to the hydrant, they fit together perfectly.

The street was filled with vehicles, crews and equipment from different towns with varying roles in the operation – all working in concert with a common goal. Clearly there was much preparation and coordination which went into the operation, including clear lines of communication and leadership. I started to contemplate how this relates to successfully deploying an enterprise mobility project.

At first glance, deploying a mobile application appears simple. Simply write the application and deploy it to the mobile device. Sounds simple, right?

When planning to mobilize any business function, there are a series of internal and external issues to review. When planning projects such as mobile banking, mobile sales force automation or mobile field service. Each of these begins with a series of in house systems which hold key data and business processes. Coordinating the in house system resources is often a large task. Once your internal systems are ready, you must consider the next layer of issues when exposing your internal data and systems to the external mobile world. Coordinating system firewalls, data security, regulatory issues and support for multiple languages need to be in place before extending to the outside world.

Like emergency service crews responding to a fire, there is a great amount of coordination which needs to take place to deploy mobile applications. The deployment of a global mobility project entails communication over dozens of telecomm carriers with varying range and quality of communication infrastructure and internet connectivity.

The mobile devices are the most diverse and fast moving in the chain of mobility. Device makers are always pushing the envelope with new capabilities. Each device maker has their own proprietary device operating system. The mobile devices themselves operate differently; some are touch screen, some have a keyboard, and some are both.

Some device platforms such as BlackBerry and iPhone are consistent in their deployment as a single company develops the hardware and the software. Others, such as the Android and Windows Mobile operating systems are incorporated into device designed by many companies. Imagine the chaos of desktop computing if this were the case across PC’s.

Unlike the fire and rescue teams on Long Beach Island, many of the interconnected partners of the mobility infrastructure are competitors not partners. There is little motivation for telecomm carriers to work together, and even less for device manufacturers.

When embarking on a mobility project, it is important that you have a leader to coordinate the project. Like the emergency service crew – experienced leadership is critical to the success in bringing together all of the disparate aspects of the project. It’s important to have a business partner who has been successful in these projects and put out the fires that will inevitably arise.

Matt T -

∞

Gosh darn I just love developers. They’re always coming up with crazy smart ideas. If we had to start this world again from scratch, I’d want to be on the team with the developers because they would figure out how to save the day – or at least be able to reverse engineer a toaster so we could all have a crumpet and nice cup of tea.

So the latest in crazy smart things that developers do happens to combine two of my favorite pastimes – music and technology. It’s an experiment from the folks at Google Chrome called “The Wilderness Downtown” — an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used To Wait.” According to ‘the Google’ (as my dad has dubbed the tech superpower), these experiments:

“… were created by designers and programmers from around the world using the latest open standards, including HTML5, Canvas, SVG, and more. Their work is making the web faster, more fun, and more open – the same spirit in which we built Google Chrome.”

This particular experiment was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.

But what the heck it exactly? Well, you just have to try it and see – honestly. It’s worth a few minutes of your day. All you have to do is type in the address of the house you grew up in and sit back and enjoy the experience:

The Wilderness Downtown

One important detail: It really only works properly if you use Google Chrome as your browser.

I don’t want to give too much away but I’ll say that it really demonstrates how LOCATION is so personal and can be used to evoke memories from childhood (even though what you see is obviously from the present). I saw my past through the lens of today and felt at once a mix of conflicting emotions, both happy and melancholy, in awe of the pure freedom we had – running across backyards for what seemed like forever. Our mothers’ voices echoing through the night trying to call us into dinner like some wild animals to be rounded up. Something tells me that this is not happening today on Lancaster Drive.

Anyway. Back to the Wilderness.

From this cool little experiment, we can see why the most compelling mobile apps use location to connect us to the world and the people and even the things around us. It takes us on a little trip and plays some great music and just so happens to demonstrate what a little Javascript in all the right places can do. The graphics are simple and beautiful –although I was a bit freaked out by the trees – the wilderness – at the end. I generally think of trees as friendly sorts (except for the bad forest in the Wizard of Oz) but these trees come across as slightly sinister. On the other hand, it could just be me.

It’s highly interactive, too, so each one of us will create a totally different film. They have also tied the virtual and physical worlds together with another phase of the experiment coming soon.

For Google, what a fantastic way to show off your stuff. And for us, what a fun journey.