Who’s in charge, anyway?

Call it one of those “duh” moments when you slap your forehead and say, “Oh, now I get it.” That’s what happened when Shell Pipeline’s mobility headaches made me realize that it’s high time we started adapting software to the way we work.

Let me explain.

How many years now have we all been talking abut mobilizing enterprise applications? How many times have BEA, IBM, Microsoft, or Oracle told you that their application servers can connect to any mobile device? Or promised the “secret sauce” that would let one of the best-of-breed infrastructure players squeeze the most complex client application onto an eight-line screen on your Nokia 3360? But in the real world, applications are often a bear for workers to use on the desktop. What do you think they’d be like on a handheld?

This was the problem Brian Ashe, former manager of measurement and quality services at Shell Pipeline, faced in late 2000. At the time, Shell’s field force was writing up inspection and repair reports on the backs of envelopes, so to speak, and coming back at the end of the week to plug the data into Shell’s SAP Preventive Maintenance (PM) application.

Ashe says, “We wanted to capture the info in the field and then transmit it in real time or in a link and think process to get it into the SAP system.” But any mobile project would have to wait. “The techs were struggling enough with SAP.”

Last year, after finally resolving the major issues with SAP, Ashe dusted off the mobile project. He decided to partner with Telispark, a Deloitte company acquired this year by Infowave Software.

Here’s where I had my “duh” moment.

Deloitte has developed what it calls Industry Prints for some 20-plus industries, using data gathered from Deloitte’s interactions with various enterprise-level companies. An Industry Print details every single process that makes up an industry. It maps processes all the way from the 10,000-foot level (run HR, run customer support) down to specific workflows for both humans and applications.

Deloitte passes these prints on to Telispark, which uses them to create mobile solutions. In Shell’s case, Telispark used Deloitte’s oil industry print as a starting point, then began following Shell field technicians around, recording what they did and when they did it.

It was only after the observation process that Telispark created an application. The result wasn’t a squeezed-down version of the SAP PM app, but a unique, customized solution that worked the way the techs in the field did.

Hard as it may be to believe, most mobile IT projects don’t take this approach.

Most companies are so bent on getting their enterprise applications into handhelds that they forget that mobility, by its nature, changes businesses’ processes and workflows — and that change must be designed into the mobile applications themselves.

Industry Prints are a series of best-practice workflows and they, or something like them, should be square one, before anyone actually does a lick of coding. The promise of high tech has yet to be fulfilled  because we continually try to adapt human behavior to the needs of technology.

Isn’t it about time we all had our “duh” moment, and started adapting the technology to us?