Page 130 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

strategic leadership in a Virtual world � 109

(virtually) twice—the second time he met us at the (virtual) door of
his home, calling us while waiting for a repair person to drop by. And
his time was money—Samsung Mobile, the division he works for, is
the leading cell phone manufacturer in the United States; it had 2008
revenues in excess of $4 billion. He was the person who caused us to
really think about the importance of having a platform when moving
to mobility.
“An enterprise leader who wants to mobilely enable the work-
force,” he told us, “must make platform decisions first and then make
the device decisions. Devices change. You need to develop the plat-
form.” Samsung makes devices for six operating systems, he told us,
and the enterprise mobility leader needs to choose one of those, or
others available, if they are going to drive value.
You can make decisions, he said, at a division level that could be
good for the business unit but couldn’t necessarily be leveraged by the
entire organization. If you are lucky, those choices can be integrated
and compatible with the larger organization. But if they aren’t, he
says, “What do you do?”
Starting with the platform is like building a house, he told us. Be-
fore anything else, you dig the hole and put the foundation in. “The
first thing you have to do is determine what the business driver is or
what the business need is. Once you derive the business need, then
you can go forward and look at a platform that you have high confi-
dence in that [you] not only can develop today but [will] be able to
develop tomorrow. . . . There’ll be a very robust set of devices that will
be able to achieve your goals.” At the end of the day, he emphasized,
the choice of devices is tactical. 8
A platform makes every other thing that’s crucial for a success-
ful mobile workforce strategy—building trust, consistency, training,
and providing the right tools, as examples—more possible. Building
a platform includes (but is more than) choosing the right operating
system and then the subsequent “how-we-do-it technology” hardware
and software questions. It also includes the core “where are we going”
leadership questions and the “how we work together” questions.