Business Agility: Strategies for Gaining Competitive Advantage through Mobile Business Solutions

processes can be streamlined? Which business processes are most crit-

ical to customer satisfaction? Which processes are most critical to

enterprise operations? Where are the bottlenecks within the supply

chain? How can vendors and suppliers be better managed in terms of

quality assurance? What information are sales reps and field service

reps asking for while in the field? What information can help them

provide better service to their customers? What information are your

customers asking for in real-time? Would they benefit from real-time,

anywhere access to order entry and order status information? Can

you provide new levels of customer service and support by leveraging

wireless devices and technologies such as SMS?

These are just a few examples of the types of questions to be ask-

ing when identifying target opportunities. Hopefully, the case studies

and examples of application areas within the book will give you ideas

for the kinds of questions to be asking within your enterprise. In the

next section, we’ll look at how to distill the opportunities that are

identified into a set of the most high-priority initiatives that will have

the most benefit for the enterprise.

Prioritization of Initiatives

In the previous phase, you may well have identified numerous oppor-

tunities for M-Business initiatives within the enterprise. The next step

is to determine which initiatives warrant further development and

how they should be prioritized. To prioritize the initiatives, you’ll

want to look at several factors. These include the following: the return

on investment; the degree of fit with current business strategy and

objectives; the degree of fit with current IT strategy; the total cost of

ownership; the competitive environment; the risk factors involved

with the project; the level of pain and need around this specific solu-

tion; the market demand if this is an external initiative; and the avail-

ability of resources and skill sets to tackle the initiative.

A cost/benefit matrix may also be a useful way to visualize which

applications provide the highest benefit with the lowest cost. Those that

provide high benefit with minimal investment are obviously quick wins.

Those that provide high benefit with larger investment costs and higher

risks are typically the more strategic applications that lie on the upper

end of the risk/reward continuum. Typically those applications that are

low risk provide less reward, but in the M-Business arena you may be

156 >> Business Agility