In part one of this series, we discussed where you should start when establishing an enterprise mobile strategy and suggested that by consolidating and standardizing as many of your mobile processes as possible, you place yourself on a stronger footing when you start evaluating the available technology options.

In this follow-up article, we will look at different technology options through the lens of a GIS professional working at a utility company.  We will attempt to answer questions, including: What are the pros and cons of the various solutions? Are certain options better suited for certain processes? And is there a best option?

This review of available technology is not intended to take the place of a detailed technical evaluation. Furthermore, you may already have one or more of these solutions in place and have different opinions about how they can – or should – be used.

The Enterprise Landscape

An enterprise mobile strategy needs to fit into the enterprise landscape of your organization. That landscape can consist of multiple parts:

• The system of record for the location and connectivity of assets
  • This is the system that tracks the location of the assets and how they connected via electrical conductor or gas pipe
• The system of record for assets
  • This system tracks information about assets such as manufacturer, data purchased, lot number, etc. There are a multitude of options out there, including IBM Maximo, SAP, Oracle and home-grown systems
• The system of record for work management
  • This system manages the actual work done around the utility. A lot of times, this is lumped into the asset management system because work and assets are typically closely linked
• The rest of the enterprise
  • There are a multitude of things that can fall under this umbrella, document management systems, customer information systems, outage management systems, and regulatory compliance databases

Any enterprise mobile technology you bring into the organization will probably have to interact with all of these systems in some fashion, and if you followed the recommendations in part one, you should already know what these interactions involve.  What are the categories of mobile technology options?  In the opinion of SSP, they are:

• Incumbent enterprise solutions
• No code and low code
• Custom-developed applications
• Mobile apps
• Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS)

Instead of trying to outline the pro and cons of these categories, we feel it is better to approach this the same way as we did in Part 1: holistically.  This is not about trying to fit a specific technology into your organization.  It is about trying to find the technology that best fits your enterprise infrastructure philosophy and business requirements.  But what are the questions you should ask when evaluating these options?

What Mobile Technology Fits Your Needs?

1. What is your budget or appetite for licensing?

Some options in the market bring little or no additional costs associated with licensing requirements and may already be included in your existing license agreements. However, these can sometimes bring limited ability to customize or integrate or may not work well with the latest GIS technology.  Depending on the mobile needs, those potential limitations may not be of any concern.

2. What is your budget or appetite for outside services to implement?

Some options in the market are easily implemented by your own IT staff, or even by the more technical members of your own (non-IT) team. However, these options may only cover simple or very specific use cases, may focus only on basic capability like data entry, or may not align with an enterprise GIS strategy.  Even with a strong IT or GIS team, you still may require a fully consultant-led implementation effort for more complicated or robust mobile technologies.

3. What is your budget or appetite for ongoing (external) maintenance costs?

Some options (particularly homegrown custom solutions) carry no ongoing external maintenance fees but will produce a heavier burden on your internal resources to keep them working as your landscape and business processes evolve.  Remember: internal maintenance is typically a hidden cost that grows slowly over time until the point it becomes a liability to your organization.  Do not minimize or ignore its importance.

4. How many apps are you comfortable asking your field forces to use?

Some options bring a genuinely intuitive user experience for targeted types of fieldwork but are limited in scope, requiring several apps to be used by a single field user.  While some users may be comfortable with shifting between different apps, others may find it confusing or inefficient.

5. How utility-specific or customizable do you need your solution to be?

Some effective mobile solutions may not be particularly focused on utility workflows and aren’t easily customized to bring about this utility focus.  Or they cannot easily or quickly be re-worked to account for changes in data models or business needs.

6. What is my appetite for customization at all?

To expand on the last question, how many customization options do you want to have available to you?  Or do you prefer a lot of out-of-the-box configuration options?  Some apps can get you a long way toward to your goals without any custom code, which lowers the complexity and costs (both internal and external) to maintain them. This might come at the expense of your ability to create a targeted user experience. Your organization’s unique priorities may guide your thinking.

In Conclusion – Part Two

Navigating the mobile enterprise solutions space is not easy when considering the depth of options available to you. Using the recommendations from part one coupled with the questions outlined in this article should provide you the tools to make the best choice for your organization.

In part three of this series, we will focus on a technical overview of SSP MIMS – a COTS enterprise mobile solution built using the ArcGIS Runtime .NET SDK.