Fashionistas And Enterprise Mobility

By Mary Brittain-White, CEO of Retriever Communications

Fashionista – a devoted follower of fashion

One of my most cherished photos is of my brother and myself as children in the 70’s, dressed in cheesecloth tops and flares, smiling broadly and oblivious to the fact that we were already fashion tragics. Things got worse in the 80’s when I started wearing shoulder pads so large that getting through some door-ways was a challenge. However this is the game of fashion, constant change to ensure that your previously treasured purchases become quickly redundant.

Strangely, large corporates are approaching enterprise mobility with a fashionista attitude: high profile new offerings that are quickly made redundant when a new approach is hailed 18 months later as the new look.

By example you can see the change of fashioned evidenced in SAP’s offering today in the field service mobility space. A customer’s option in scheduling has moved through the alphabet over the last 3 years starting with SAP RPA, to an alliance with Clicksoftware called SAP WSO to today’s favourite look SAP WSO. Each solution is completely independent of the last, no upgrade path, just a new project that is already superseded before you have finished deployment. SAP mobility  for field technicians is little different with the internal struggle on approach, Sybase Vs web based approaches like Fiori, reflected in competing options that are fundamentally opposed.

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