ABSTRACT
Chapter Key Points Discusses the process dimension of Mobile Enterprise Transition (MET) ◾ wherein the impact of mobility on business processes is understood with the aim of engineering mobile business processes Creates an understanding of the “mobile context” of the user in modeling ◾ business processes Discusses quality-of-service (QoS) issues such as real-time response and cov-◾ erage from a business viewpoint by balancing it against cost Presents the ever-important financial applications with and for mobility, ana-◾ lyzing and creating a sequence of factors that can be put together in a framework for the process dimension of MET
Presents the evolving complexity of the process dimension through informative, ◾ transactive, operative, and collaborative use of mobility in this dimension Presents the relevance of the known process-modeling techniques of UML ◾ (activity diagrams and use cases) and BPMN in mobile process modeling Discusses the mobile business applications, their natures, categories, chal-◾ lenges, and their implementations in mobile CRM and mobile SCM Outlines the relevance of mobile collaborations to mobile business ◾
Introduction This chapter discusses the impact of mobility on the business processes of an enterprise and also the positive influence of process modeling on proper utilization of mobility by business. Earlier, in Chapter 3, we discussed the economic dimension, and in Chapter 4 the technical dimension of MET. These earlier discussions focused on “why” to mobilize the enterprise (the compelling economic situation) and “what” causes that mobilization (the technical impact), respectively. This current chapter is focused on “how” the business processes of an organization change and “how” new business processes are introduced as the organization undergoes mobile transition. Modeling of business processes, use of mobile applications and mobile business packages, reengineering of processes, quality of service, and the financial aspects of mobile processes are some of the important parts of the MET process dimension discussed in this chapter. The end result of incorporating mobile technologies in business processes should be of “value” to the customer. These customer “values” accrue when the organization investigates and analyzes the customer in the “context” of the mobile environment in which the customer exists. Therefore, this chapter initially delves deeper into the context of the user. A number of other factors, such as collaborations between employers, and other external systems also come into play in providing value to mobile users. The various aspects of a process, and the way these process aspects are affected by mobility, are shown in Figure 5.1.
