Action in Uncertainty: How to Achieve IT and Operations Business Goals in Today’s Climate

Making decisions in uncertain times is an uncomfortable place to be. Wall Street and Main Street have both put off new and/or risky investments. At the same time, for IT and operations leadership running a mobile workforce, there are changes that must be made to accommodate business goals in this new normal of COVID-19.

How can IT and operations leadership achieve business goals now amidst changes, surges, and cut backs?

There are two approaches to getting the most out of mobile applications, networks, hardware and processes:

1) Empower mobile users and enable remote support of mission-critical mobile infrastructure (apps, networks, hardware).

2) Improve productivity with small, but impactful, adjustments or upgrades without complete overhauls or bringing in new vendors.

The investment required to go down these paths is more about mindshare than large capital investments in new technology. An unbiased, data-driven understanding of the performance of the current environment allows IT and operations teams to know for certain which changes are needed and what the relative effects those will have on the business.

For example, a single application change that eliminates a 4-second latency slowing 20% of mobile users in a high-speed warehouse picking operation is a lower-cost, higher-return mitigation than upgrading all of the wireless access points because of coverage issues that only affect dock workers 5% of the time.

Certainty of Partnerships
Barcoding and Connect Inc. have partnered to deliver certainty in these uncertain times, using people, process, and technology to access actionable information about the mobile systems on record. The technology ties the point of impact (mobile associate or data collection point) to the performance of the mobile systems directly and in real-time. Typically, this would require log blending, or other programming, and expensive software to get a comprehensive understanding of a complex and distributed system like the mobile infrastructure.

The technology provides the core data for analysis and this three-step process provides a structure for recommending action to meet business goals:

1) Discovery: Assess the current state of mobile technology performance in direct relation to mobile associate performance.

2) Analysis: Capture the bottlenecks as the system performs in real-time and view the impact to workflows of the mobile users as well as the resources required to support it currently.

3) Decision: Prioritize the technology and process issues discovered, assess their impacts on the business, and consider the adjustments required to mitigate issues and improve outcomes.

Finally, we look at what access to this new data analysis means for the processes around IT service management and resources required to meet demand and prepare for the future.

Whether your company is looking to do more with less, or quickly scale-up and add new technology and people, businesses and people do better with certainty; and certainty comes from relevant, accurate, and actionable information.

This post was written by guest blogger Shari Christofferson of Connect Inc. Learn more about our partnership with Mobile Systems Intelligence by Connect Inc. here.