The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution

Chapter 10. Position: Select Your Target Markets, Customers, and Applications

Building mobility into your product, service, or process requires investment and introduces change for your employees and customers. That change may be embraced, or it may be rejected. Because of this uncertainty, and to limit your initial investment, it’s wise to carefully select a limited initial deployment to gain experience, fine tune the mobile integration, and prove the business case for maximum success with minimum pain moving forward.

For these reasons, in selecting the initial target markets, customers, and applications for your move into mobility, it is critical to think in terms of three factors:

1. Risk

2. Reward

3. Replication

Risk

The old saying is “with the greater the risk, comes the greater reward,” but we all know that’s not always accurate. Great rewards are rarely gained without any risk, but a wise businessman will find ways to eliminate unnecessary risk and balance the necessary risk with the available rewards.

When mobilizing a product, service, or process, risk takes three primary forms. The most obvious is the risk that things just won’t work when your customers and employees expect them to. We’ll call this performance risk. The second very scary risk is that your mobilized product, service, or process will work perfectly, but your customers and employees will reject it. We’ll call this acceptance risk. The third kind of risk is the best kind of all—success risk. Success risk represents the chance ...