Mobile technology is ever-changing and expanding, and mobile solutions are fast becoming ubiquitous in the utility industry. It is not uncommon for a utility to have multiple mobile applications from different vendors with no cohesive strategy for managing them. Many of these applications may seem necessary since most focus on very specific business needs while others may appear redundant because they address duplicate and overlapping uses. What do you do to get a handle on your mobile technology and ensure you have an effective strategy? Develop an enterprise mobile strategy of course!

Consolidation and Standardization

The first thing to do is catalog all the mobile applications and custom tools that your company uses along with their various use cases. You should seek management or executive support prior to starting this effort to help frame the importance of the task. Perform an inventory of all the primary data capture tools, the inspection forms, and the work management solutions. Look at engineering, operations, field services, and work and asset management processes and technology solutions for common data requirements and duplicate sources of data. This will help you identify functional overlaps and start working with stakeholders to identify candidates for consolidation. This effort can get contentious because people get very tied to their applications and will fight for their solutions. It’s important for all involved in this stage to remember that you are just collecting data (pun intended) from your various user groups to inform the mobile strategy.

Next, look through those use cases and define a list of candidate applications or work processes to consolidate or approach through a more standardized process. Take inspections as an example. Not every piece of equipment needs a special form. On the electric side of the business, you can potentially consolidate similar pieces of equipment, such as transformers, loadbreak junctions, and switchgears into one inspection form. The same holds true with maps. Does every user need a unique display, or can a standard base map be used? Reducing the number of forms and maps simplifies the administration of the system and makes it easier for your field workers to know which forms to use for what.

Speaking of field workers

Recognize the critical importance that field workers play in your mobile strategy. Beyond just understanding the whys of collecting data, you need them involved in prototyping and trial runs to understand the level of effort and process timing. How much time do you want them spending at a location or entering data? 5 minutes? 15 minutes? What is a reasonable expectation given the task? Is what you’re asking them to collect even feasible? What is their opinion on the process and what is being asked of them? You need them bought in to be successful. Complicated forms with impossible requirements will lead to bad data and frustrated users. And that brings us to the design of forms and the management of data. As much as possible, simplicity and intuitiveness should be the drivers.

Forms and Data Management

Along with the consolidation and standardization step, it’s also important to evaluate why the data on any form is being collected and how is it being used in the office.  Questions to ask include:

• Are there items that don’t bring value?
• Are there things missing that need to be added?
• Is there too much data being collected?
• Are field workers even using the forms?

Finally, to ensure the integrity of the collected data, you need to concern yourself with how to record it. You want to avoid freehand typing as you will get a lot of, shall we say, interesting results that have to be deciphered and normalized. Dropdown selections make the most sense for repeatable, clean results. Once you start collecting data in the field, you need to ensure that you have designed a flexible process that can adapt to rapid changes. Recognize that the data and process design does not always match the realities of conditions in the field and prepare to change to address those realities. You may need to change based on what the field worker finds in the field (“I don’t have a way to accurately record this scenario”) or to address a new corporate driver (“Let’s locate all the areas where we installed equipment from this manufacturer”).

In Conclusion – Part One

The reality of implementing an enterprise mobile strategy is that it is not easy, and it is doubtful you will be able to roll ALL of your mobile application use cases into one platform. However, if you do a careful analysis of what your business drivers are and why they are important, you can start bringing efficiency and order to your mobile applications and custom tools. Tune in next time when we discuss available technology and the technical aspects of an enterprise mobile strategy.