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milja_gillespie
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I’ve had many conversations with peers and analysts over the last few years about mobile Return on Investment (ROI). I’ve recently taken on the project of finding an industry expert to share thoughts on why enterprises should care about ROI and give some guidance on how to wrap your head around it.

After all, most companies have already started to embrace mobility as a strategic initiative. Many have deployed apps to meet their end user’s and customer’s needs. But how many of them have thought about ROI and its importance?

Enabling field workers and improving productivity for employees with mobile helps businesses run more smoothly. Yet it seems that few companies have established any means of concretely measuring the success or failure of their mobility deployments.  Studies have shown that there is a lack of
measurement in most organizations as to whether they are achieving an ROI. In fact, some organizations simply guess ROI, and as for those who do measure mobile ROI, they are struggling to know if it is “good” or not. 

According to Jack Gold of J. Gold Associates, who wrote a whitepaper for SAP on the subject, “Many companies use ROI as an important component of their budgetary process, particularly when evaluating investment in new infrastructure projects and business process solutions. But determining ROI for mobile is often different than traditional application approaches, since mobile is generally much more complex and diverse than conventional client/server PC-based solutions.”

There are some complexities to mobile, that's for sure. All mobile users are not alike – and they certainly provide varying levels of productivity improvements. An inspector that can save 60 minutes a day eliminating the need for paperwork is much easier to measure than a knowledge worker who cleans up their email inbox while watching a movie. Add the complexities of BYOD and even BYOA (apps) to the mix and you can see how the discussion can get pretty broad pretty quickly. 

What do you think about mobile ROI?

I invite you to join SAP's own ROI expert Ralf Weppernig and Jack Gold for a frank discussion on this topic on April 25th. In the webinar we’ll address questions including:

  • What constitutes a successful mobile initiative?
  • Should all mobile solutions be evaluated under the same criteria? 
  • Should the ROI be 10%, 25%, 150%?

I think that achieving an ROI is critical given the significant investment and effort required to make mobile solutions work. The whitepaper written by Jack Gold (which you receive when registering for the webinar) focuses on ways for enterprises to create guidelines and measurement criteria to determine the ROI of mobile projects. It offers suggested criteria that will help you plan, implement and operate the most cost effective apps with the best payback opportunity. And it will give guidance on what constitutes a successful return on enterprise mobile initiatives. While organizations are unique and have varying requirements, the general guidance available within this paper should prove useful to virtually all enterprises.

I hope you’ll join us for this discussion. You can register for the live webinar on April 25th.

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