When we built the new Smart IT UX for BMC Remedy, we were determined to allow ALL IT Support Workers to be Mobile. Why? Because everyone can benefit from mobility.
In the short history of enterprise mobility, mobile business applications have generally focused on two specific user groups. The first is the group of users for whom being on the road is the bulk of their job, such as field engineers: they go to a location, perform some tasks, move on to the next place.
The second group is those who might be based at a desk in an office, but who move around through a series of meetings, on and off-site. For these users, the primary purpose of mobility has been continuity of communication (with the weapon of choice having historically been the keyboard-equipped Blackberry).
For most other users, performing most other business tasks, the desktop computer (or desk-based notebook computer) still remained the key delivery mechanism for business applications.
Today, this is an outdated philosophy.
I recently stood in a lift at a customer’s office. There were four people in that elevator, and there were seven smartphones on display. Okay, two of them were mine (I’m a mobility product manager, after all), but that is still a notable average.
Even in the short moment offered by a journey of just a few floors, those office-based employees found a moment to communicate. Whether that communication was work-based or personal, one-way or two-way, is irrelevant. The point is that the time was being used to perform those tasks in a way that could not have happened just a few years ago.
In the December 2014/January 2015 edition of Fast Company, Larry Erwin, a Business Development Executive with Google, points out:
“When I was a kid growing up back in the ’90s, I was the only kid on my block with a Tandy 1000. Now kids who are 15, 16 years old have a supercomputer in their pocket”
The opportunity for business software tools to take advantage of that new computing power is huge, and growing. The very structure of the traditional office is under pressure, as users become more mobile and more technology enabled. That generation of teenagers will soon enter the workplace having had a completely different, and more universal grounding in technology than we select geeks who owned the Tandy 1000s and Sinclair Spectrums of yesteryear.
Mobility has already become a primary means of service consumption for customers, across a swathe of industries. Consider the process of taking a flight: with many airlines, the entire customer experience has been mobilized. Forrester Research outlined this beautifully in a 2014 illustration charting the timeline of mobile engagement for the airline passenger:
- -2 Weeks: Book ticket, change reservation
- -2 Days: Change seat, request upgrade
- -2 Hours: Check in, check gate, departure time, lounge access
- Flight: Arrival time, food order, movies, wi-fi, duty free
- +2 Hours: Ground transport, lost luggage, navigation
- +2 Days: Mileage status, reward travel, upcoming reservations
- +2 Weeks: Mileage points earned, customer satisfaction survey
(Source: Forrester)
Mobility for the consumer is now table stakes. So why not extend this to the people serving those consumers? Mobility, simply, provides great opportunities to enhance the role of the service representative.
When I arrived at a Westin Hotel in Chicago last month, I needed to speak with reception, and joined the line of people at the check-in desk. However, I was approached by a staff member with an iPad. They were quickly able to answer my question. The Starwood Hotels group, he told me, aims to keep its hotel staff on their feet, closer to customers, delivering service in a more dynamic way. Even the group’s CEO, Fritz van Paasschen, has abandoned his desk and PC: a Wall Street Journal article in November 2014 revealed that he works entirely on tablet and smartphone (van Paasschen’s office contains no desk – just a boardroom table and a couch).
In an IT Service Management environment, the case for mobility for field support users has long been clear: the alternative being a hotch-potch of printed dockets, slow communication, and inconvenient (or omitted) retrospective updates to systems of record, back at a field office.
But even in the office, it’s important to realise that good IT service, like all good customer service, combines communication, expertise, initiative and process. Many people involved in that process are not at their desk all day: they may be in meetings, or travelling between sites, or sitting with colleagues.
If those people can only access their support tools from their desk, then gaps appear. Twenty minutes waiting for input from an approver or technical expert could amount to twenty minutes more waiting time for the customer, or even a missed window to communicate with the next person in the chain (and hence an even bigger gap). Mobilising people – properly – fills those gaps, even in the office. And, as the IT department’s customers get more mobile, the best way to support them is often to become more mobile.
When we built the Smart IT interface for BMC Remedy, released in September 2014, this was the philosophy of our mobile approach: ITSM should be mobile for every user, whether they are field support technicians roaming a wide area, or a service desk agent taking a five minute break at the coffee machine.
The tool needed to provide all the features they need, including comprehensive teamwork features and assistiveness, so that they are never forces to find a desk or wait for the slow boot-up of a traditional PC. We released the tablet version of Smart IT on day one, and the phone version, scheduled to be live in December 2014, has been already received a great reception in demonstrations at customer events. As with Smart IT in general, there’s no additional cost over and above a standard Remedy ITSM license.
Our work with our ITSM customers has shown us, and them, that there are huge and real business benefits to seamless and comprehensive mobile experience. Time not spent in front of a PC no longer needs to be time spent not helping customers.
Properly equipped, an increasingly mobile-focused user base is sure to find those benefits, and that means faster, better outcomes for IT’s customers.
Evolving ITSM 