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A View from 35,000 feet

September/October 2001

As leader of Deloitte Consulting's Global Wireless Initiative Martin Dunsby travels the globe, advising clients on mobilizing the enterprise. His position affords him both a lofty view of the mobile landscape, and a grasp of its finer details. Recently, he shared his perspective with Wireless Internet Magazine.  

Educated at Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree in politics, philosophy and economics, Dunsby confesses to passions for crew, sailing and snowboarding. He has worked in the telecom industry for a decade, first for Cellular One, then GTE Mobile, a forerunner to Verizon. He joined Deloitte Consulting five years ago. In 2000 Deloitte formed its Global Wireless Initiative, a catalyst team of 30 or so people, culled from the consulting firm's myriad industry practices, who apply lessons learned in early adopter industries to the firm's broader client base. Deloitte Consulting employs about 10,000 people around the world and is part of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which is staffed globally by about 80,000 people. Dunsby keeps a flat in London and a loft in Atlanta, but he spends considerable time jetting at 35,000 feet between those two cities and Denver, San Francisco, Dusseldorf, Toronto and Madrid.

WIM: Tell us why and how Deloitte Consulting formed its Global Wireless Initiative and where that fits in with the parent organization.

Dunsby: We recognized almost a year ago that we were getting a lot of requests from our clients on what to do about wireless. We were doing various, disparate wireless projects for clients and we saw that this technology would alter the competitive landscape in many industries. So we formed the Global Wireless Initiative to pull together our activities and alliances in each of our industry practices. We created a catalyst team, of which I'm the leader, to ensure that we share what we're learning. This allows us to rapidly communicate best practices and have a focal point for communications with our clients, with the press, with analysts and our alliance partners on our experiences in the marketplace. We're focused across all industries, globally. We'd like to emphasize that fact because, although different regions around the world are at different stages of development and there are differences in what works locally, there is a lot of commonality.

WIM: How does the Global Wireless Initiative work?

Dunsby: The wireless initiative core team right now is about 30 people. It really is a catalyst team-we're not a separate, core practice. Our members come from within each of our industry practices, our "verticals," which are functional, delivery-based organizations. One of the success factors for wireless deployment, both for our clients and for Deloitte, is that we need to be completely integrated with other activities in the firm. So this arrangement allows us to quickly share best practices between industries, while remaining nimble and focused.

WIM: Tell us about your own career trajectory.

Dunsby: Academically, I went to school in England, at Oxford University, and graduated with a master's degree in politics, philosophy and economics-a completely improbable  degree perhaps, but it equipped me well to handle the uncertainty and conflicting opinions within a dynamic industry like telecommunications. My professional career began, seemingly, a long time ago. I used to work for Cellular One, then GTE Mobile, one of the forerunners of Verizon Wireless. I worked in sales, client support and in the delivery of what were then advanced data applications. They seem archaic now. At GTE I worked on the deployment of backup systems for data centers, which were using 4.8-kilobit error-correcting, analog wireless modems, which was leading edge at the time. Now we're 11-megabit 802.11b. It seems amazing. Then about ten years ago I moved into consulting and joined Deloitte five years ago.

WIM: Give us a sense of the variety of clients you give guidance to on wireless.

Dunsby: What I've enjoyed in my current role, and what's made us a success as a firm, is that we've applied the lessons learned from early-adopter industries across other industries. Right now the areas that we're finding with greatest return on investment are those industries with large numbers of people involved in field service, supply chain and field sales. The lessons learned there, and the metrics that drive the business cases, are applicable across all industries.

WIM: So you provide prospective clients with case studies on what's worked elsewhere to illustrate a convincing ROI?

Dunsby: Exactly. In the current business climate, really no organization would undertake any major project-especially a wireless project-without understanding the business case and the potential for value creation.

WIM: Apart from your experiences with early adopters, what other primary research informs your guidance to clients?

Dunsby: There are four areas that drive our primary research. First, our experience with enterprise clients has given us a great deal of insight. Secondly, we have alliances with leading global organizations such as Nokia, Lucent, Vodafone and Telefonica, which affords us their insights. Thirdly, Deloitte Research, which is part of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, is our think tank, if you will. It performs primary research to help our clients understand trends. It recently released the report, "Mobilizing the Enterprise." Lastly, Telispark, a company we've spun out of Deloitte Consulting, is a wireless software firm that's developed high-performance, process-driven wireless applications for field service and field sales and other areas. Telispark is an applications server that has built-in connectors to interface with enterprise-class applications. So if you're a large enterprise and want to deploy a mobile application for your work force, Telispark includes off-the-shelf, optimized business processes for field sales and field service and it includes the backend technology connectors, so it cuts short the path to deployment of enterprise-class wireless applications. Telispark's success in the wireless marketplace allows us to understand that space as well.  

WIM: How do your alliances with global players serve you?

Dunsby: We share views on the evolution of the marketplace. Clearly, we do a lot of market delivery together. With clients, we perform development work together to ensure that we thoroughly understand the products and solutions of our alliance partners. And we do joint marketing and events as well.

WIM: Deloitte Research's report, "Mobilizing the Enterprise," states that enterprise applications are not dependent on bandwidth, high-speed networks or screen size-elements considered more essential for the consumer market. Is this the mantra coming through the 3G-hype haze, now that there's a solid business case with quantifiable ROI for mobilizing the enterprise?

Dunsby: Partly. Two things: From a network point of view, for enterprise-class applications, you don't need a lot of bandwidth to drive the business case. For example, probably the most successful enterprise application is the RIM BlackBerry's wireless e-mail. Simple application, but much valued by many organizations. That runs on 4.8 kbps network. In the consumer space, the widely acknowledged leader is NTT DoCoMo and its i-mode service, which runs on a 9.6 kbps network. So bandwidth is not the constraint-the constraint is the process and the device. To answer the second point, if you deploy within the enterprise, you can define and distribute an appropriate type of device to enable employees to take advantage of wireless applications. You don't have to wait for the public to buy more capable devices to drive the price lower.

WIM: "Mobilizing the Enterprise" also speaks to companies that have sought consumer applications that have missed the boat. What's happened? Can you give us an example?

Dunsby: They didn't miss the boat so much as they may have been a couple or three years early. With the promise of the great consumer wireless Internet, many companies deployed products and sites and no consumers showed up. A good example of that is Amazon.com Anywhere, where Amazon invested in an advanced, consumer-oriented wireless sales and personalization offering. Great piece of technology, but too early. Consumers didn't have the devices and the patience to utilize it. The constraint at this point is the device. Consumers have shown time and again that what they value most is a cheap price. And that's limiting adoption of more advanced devices such as the RIM BlackBerry and the i-mode handsets. It's a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation: The advanced applications aren't there, so consumers don't see why they should pay more for handsets, and the applications aren't there because people don't have advanced handsets. But we'll get there.

WIM: "Mobilizing the Enterprise" refers to the tedium for frontline employees trying to access back-end enterprise systems and to the "desktop paradigm." Are mobile user interfaces inconsistent? Drilling down too frustrating?

Dunsby: Desktop knowledge workers really have been very well trained in a couple different ways. From an application point of view, we've been trained to do Start, Run, click on program icon, log-in-usually with a username and password-click through menus, select files, choose an application. And each application has slightly different navigation cues and user interfaces. The other way we've been trained is to expect our platform to fail; we expect it to lockup once or twice a day and we think it's perfectly reasonable to reboot and everything will be OK. Mobile workers don't have the time, the patience and the navigation capabilities and the device is too primitive to do the log-in, click, click, click navigation approach. And to go through all that and have the session interrupted, or to hang fire, is unacceptable. So the desktop paradigm just isn't viable on a mobile device. So you have to use a platform that does a single log-on for all applications and presents a consistent user interface that will seamlessly integrate requests for information about your customers and the status of an order those customers have placed, and present that efficiently to the mobile worker.

WIM: Deloitte's direction to enterprise on a wireless initiative calls attention to the organizational implications of empowering frontline personnel.

Dunsby: The issue of reviewing organizational processes is important because that drives the business case and the value of most mobile implementations. The value does not come from the deployment of mobile technology. The value comes from the process and organizational change that mobile technology allows: empowering frontline people, giving them information they need about their clients, allowing them to issue invoices on behalf of the company, real-time information on the status of orders, those kinds of things.

WIM: Another guiding principle is the mantra, "Just the right information to the right people at the right time."

Dunsby: That's what we term "unicasting." Mobile devices allow for a change in how we interact with each other. Think back to five years ago, when I would telephone you in several places you were likely to be. I'd phone your home, your office, your car, and I would hope you would intersect with one of those places. Now I'd call your cellular phone and you'd recognize my number and decide whether to pick up, based on the fact it was me calling you. So mobility has changed the way we interact in voice communications. It has the same potential on the data side now. Most organizations have a tremendous amount of information on their operations, locked up in CRM systems and ERP systems, manufacturing management systems. But that information is locked up in Web sites or in paper reports that pass through people's offices and you hope that the person who can use that information intersects with it at the time he or she can use it. It's a very random thing. Wireless mobility allows you to "unicast" that information specifically to that individual, specifically when they need it. So rather than having a report that compares the efficiency of production lines in factories around the world, for example, sitting on a Web site, you should send that information to the supervisor of a specific line, when they are on the factory floor. The unicast might say, for example, this particular station on this line is operating at 12 percent less efficiency than comparable stations around the world. That way, that person can do something with that information and unlock the value of the huge investments these companies have made in these back-end systems.

WIM: That moves some decision-making to the front line of employees. But large corporations can be stodgy places where shifts of that nature are resisted. Obstacle or welcome change?

Dunsby: You're right, it's a big deal. I wouldn't characterize it so much as an obstacle as something that has to be taken account of. Getting full value out of wireless applications is not about technology deployment. It's about this organizational transformation. That's part of the reason why, at Deloitte, we're excited about wireless. Because this is the kind of thing we've been doing for a long time-understanding how industries work, best practices for processes, organizational structures within those industries and helping our large clients transform themselves to take advantage of technology. We've done it with ERP, with e-business. Wireless is another wave of technology change that's going to lead to another optimized organizational structure, another set of processes on how to deal with clients, how to deal with employees. It does have the potential to cause significant pain in an organization if the people in the organization don't understand that this is really about a transformation, not about technology deployment.

WIM: Do clients balk, once they understand the fundamental nature of that transformation?

Dunsby: We have some tools to help them understand where they are. It's not an issue of whether an organization is ready or not ready. It's based on a process on an organizational-unit level. Our "m-transformation path" shows clients the move from wireless enablement, the first step, which is just deploying technology, through wireless reinvention, where we look at the processes and organizational aspects, then, finally, to wireless discontinuity, where fundamentally new business models arise. So we help clients understand the path they'll follow as they go through this. Then we have an "m-transformation readiness assessment," which, done in conjunction with the client, measures whether they're ready and, if so, where to start deploying wireless applications. It is an issue. It's not something every enterprise should start deploying. Again, it should be driven by the business case, not the technology.  

WIM: Do you apply ROI models at each phase?

Dunsby: Exactly. As part of the "m-transformation" assessment, a client gets a ranked series of wireless projects showing the high-level time lines and business cases for those projects. And they get the assumptions and implications of deploying those projects.

WIM: Does the size of a company or organization help define whether it's capable of an "m-transformation"?

Dunsby: In general, the returns for an enterprise are proportional to the scale of the processes we're affecting. That is to say, the larger the field service force, the larger the return. That seems like an obvious thing to say, but what we found is that the returns don't hit a limit. They scale, linearly, with the size of the process we're dealing with. That's because lots of the heavy lifting is done by the technology. As long as the technology is designed well and deployed well and the processes are optimized, it's not something that sort of bogs down when you get large numbers of people using it. For smaller companies, one of the things we look at in the m-transformation readiness assessment is that the initial capital cost needs to be weighed against the return. That's a fairly obvious statement too, but the capital cost derives not because we're using a lot of off-the-shelf technology here, the capital costs can be similar for most organizations. Then it's just a question of the devices, training, the rollout, license fees-those sorts of things.

WIM: "Mobilizing the Enterprise" states that businesses still face a steep learning curve "to ascertain sustainable levels of risks involved with mobile data applications." What are the risks?

Dunsby: There are two dimensions to the risk. One is fairly well understood: the purely data-security risk. What's the risk of losing the device or being hacked into from remote access? The whole idea of accessing data remotely is scary to a lot of IT managers. But there are a lot of benefits there. So there's definitely the basic security use of secure sockets layer, encryption, validation and various end-to-end technology becomes very important. It's not just somebody hacking. "Denial of service" also is a very significant thing in a wireless application. This is going to become even more important when location-based technology comes into play. Much as I would love to know where my field service force is, for example, I would much more like to know where my competitor's field service force is. The other aspect of security is not so much the nefarious aspect, if you will, but the process integrity of security. If you're empowering field service people to send invoices for their service on behalf of the company, you need to be sure that the right business rules have been implemented, so they can only do what's appropriate. Clearly, there's a risk in empowering your frontline workers, giving frontline workers-people who are not familiar with the system-access to all these back-end systems. That's what drives the value, but there is a risk as well.

WIM: Does the mantra, "Just the right information, the right people at the right time" also limit security risks?

Dunsby: Getting back to the unicast, the goal here is: What is necessary, appropriate and valuable for an individual to have access to? That's an important part of it.

WIM: You've described the implications for the organizational structure and the decision-making process. But ROI for mobile data always seems to focus on productivity, efficiency, accuracy: essentially, cost takeouts. Are there direct, revenue-producing roles for wireless in the enterprise?

Dunsby: Sure. When we do a business case we calculate ROI in terms of both hard cost [takeouts] and soft costs, as we characterize them. Hard costs are those directly and absolutely quantifiable, like reduced cycle time for invoicing, reduced inventory flow if necessary, savings in time. Soft costs are what we believe to be true but are less quantifiable. They revolve around improved customer service, improved cross-selling, potential increases in efficiency because employees are more motivated and feel they have the proper tools to do the job. The soft costs tend to be more on the revenue-generating side and can be very significant. But we find that in wireless projects that we build business cases for, usually the hard costs alone are sufficient to justify the project. The soft costs are a bonus.

WIM: Can you give us an example on the revenue-generating side?

Dunsby: Take the ability to cross-sell. If a field service person goes out to a client and the client expresses dissatisfaction with a device or is interested in a new device, the field service person could very rapidly trigger a sales call, notifying a sales person in real time to respond rapidly, while the customer remained interested. That will increase the close rates on sales calls. So there's an example where it's clear that revenue will be generated, but it's difficult to absolutely quantify it.

WIM: Let's turn to the consumer side. You have operator clients in Europe. What are you seeing in terms of GPRS rollouts and uptake? What's driving it and what's limiting it?

Dunsby: What's driving it at the moment? Carriers are driving it out to pilot enterprise customers. It does depend on the country. Germany and Austria have got fully deployed networks. Others, like the U.K. for example, are in pilot mode, shall we say. Initial rollouts are going to business users with wirelessly enabled laptops. British Telecom has launched the RIM BlackBerry over here on a GPRS network. They're also deploying first to enterprise customers. I believe they'll also deploy third-generation networks in a similar manner. The take-up at this point is limited to the extent that the carriers are going slowly. They don't want to give GPRS a bad name. They're focusing on high-value enterprises before a broader rollout. So the limiting factor is the devices and the applications. The BlackBerry is the first innovative device. As carriers roll out more devices to take advantage of "always on," which obviously is a big benefit of GPRS, we'll see broader take-up. It's not in the consumer space yet.

WIM: What's on the minds of your operator clients right now?

Dunsby: They've got two major issues. One is determining the products and services they should offer. Everyone, of course, is grasping for killer applications. They're questioning whether they should be in the content business. Should they be in the business of advanced services? If so, what should they target first? How should they deliver them? Should they become an ASP? Should they build alliances to accomplish these things? The second category has to do with technology. Everyone by and large is committed to 2.5G at this point. Do they need to deploy 3G? If so, do they build alone or partner, as British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom have done? Or should they go to the virtual operator route for 3G?

WIM: Is the answer the same for all operators? Do they really have individual business cases or are there truths common to all?

Dunsby: It does depend on the client, the market and the scale. There are some [common] things we've found. There's a real possibility that the underlying transport itself will become a commodity and, therefore, competitively priced down to the commodity level, which is not a good thing from a carrier's perspective. So that's one thing all carriers have to think about. What if, like the long-distance carriers, their product becomes subject to commodity pricing and brutal competition? Another issue is scale. In order to deploy these next-generation services, host ASP capabilities, build enterprise-class services and provide them end-to-end takes scale. It takes significant expense and technology sophistication to support those kinds of applications. Those with scale have the advantage over those without it. That likely will lead to partnering and consolidation activities.

WIM: What would lead you to advise a particular client to proceed with its 3G buildout?

Dunsby: "3G," referring to the network, is pretty much entirely driven by capacity needs, apart from any regulatory commitments they've signed on for as a result of obtaining spectrum licenses. But the very reason for doing 3G the network has to do with the exhaustion of their current 2G and 2.5G spectrum. From the standpoint of next-generation applications and next-generation handsets, however, carriers should proceed as fast as they can-now. The popular press tends to characterize 3G as meaning fancy, killer handsets. So I'm drawing a distinction between 3G the underlying RF network technology, which offers carriers the benefit of capacity, and 3G the video e-mail and fancy handsets which should be deployed today on existing networks.

WIM: I note that Sprint PCS and Verizon already are trumpeting their so-called 3G buildouts. Would you advise against that?

Dunsby: Well, I think that marketing departments trumpeting the arrival of 3G and carriers investing tens of billions of dollars in actually implementing 3G are two different things. They have two different decision criteria attached to each.

WIM: Is that a "No"?

Dunsby: [Laughter.] That is the challenge of 3G, right? There's no killer user service. The killer user services can come equally as well on 2.5G. That's the challenge to the operators. Yes it's great to be first with 3G to display technical prowess and investment in forward-thinking technology. But from a user's point of view, I'll get my 3G phone and I have high expectations, but it's basically the same capability as right now on 2.5G.

WIM: In your "M-Outlooks" newsletter you refer to the "embedded future." Take out the crystal ball, tell us how you see this developing and its implications.

Dunsby: We're already seeing examples of "always connected." OnStar is a great example of embedded connectivity. In Europe you're seeing drink machines and parking meters being connected. Wireless point-of-sale systems are widely deployed. So we're seeing communications capabilities being built-in to many pieces of infrastructure. So, in the same way that, ten years ago, computing power started to get built into places, it seems likely the same thing will happen with communications. That has great implications for corporations: knowing where assets are, what their status is and having access to that information in real time, all the time. That's a value. As the cost for that connectivity keeps dropping, more applications become worthwhile.

WIM: Leave us with a few parting thoughts, sweeping in scope or otherwise, about the wireless future.

Dunsby: Ten years ago, cellular phones were a luxury and the luxury was being able to be reached. The height of vanity was to take your brick with an antenna on top of it and place it on the table at a fine restaurant and getting your secretary to call you on it. Now we're in a reverse environment. It's considered crass to have your phone go off in a nice restaurant. It's a luxury to be unreachable. I think there will be more permutations of this reachable-unreachable issue. If you're interested in socioeconomic implications, a lot of the work we're doing with state and federal governments revolves around unicasting to individual constituents, which could lead to much more responsive, granular government. Instead of an overwhelming bureaucracy, you'll be able to pinpoint exactly what you need. A good example of that is what we just deployed with the state of California. The governor's office has deployed a wireless notification system on a portal we developed with them. It will notify individual constituents when they are about to be affected by a power blackout. So instead of filtering information through the news media the governor can actually reach out to the affected individuals. That's powerful, something you wouldn't expect, quite frankly, out of a typical government organization.