Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

Sorry for the lack of postings lately. I've been mountain biking in the Taurus Mountains of Turkey. I'm now home and refreshed and as I was talking to a sales rep in love with his Blackberry whilst on the plane I thought I'd blog about the mobile channel's role in the front line - sales. Sales force automation isn’t a new phenomenon by any means and with the advent of RIM’s Blackberry handheld devices the filofax and briefcase full of samples is no longer the icon of the travelling salesman. Instead, no self respecting sales professional would be seen dead in public doing anything other than thumbing a little bit of 3x4 plastic. But other than providing sales professionals with instant, anywhere access to their email, what does sales force automation via the mobile channel actually provide? By providing access to sophisticated business workflow processes and the complex data they utilise from a mobile device, means that the sales force are no longer on a perpetual d...

Loyalty schemes have been around for a while now. We've all got, or at know someone who's got, a Tesco Clubcard , Nectar card or something similar. So how can the mobile channel improve on this type of loyalty scheme? I'll hopefully answer that for you in a second, but for first here's my definition of Mobile Loyalty so we're all on the same page... Mobile Loyalty is the use of the mobile device (phone, pda , smartcard etc) to encourage loyalty to a particular brand, retail chain or group of like minded retailers. It's also a way of tracking shopping habits for use in future targeted marketing, product development and enhancing customer satisfaction. It includes the distribution and redemption of vouchers (such as BOGOF , discount or trial offers). Vouchers could take the form of a numerical code sent in a SMS text message, a digital voucher in the form of a graphical barcode or, in the not too distant future, an NFC tag (more on that later). So why...

The success of Mobile Commerce will ultimately depend on a number of enabling factors. Firstly the wide-spread availability of cost effective handsets with sufficient technological capability to make undertaking transactions user friendly and, more importantly, secure. Second, the cost of using such handsets for undertaking transactions needs to be minimal, otherwise the plastic smart card remains the most attractive option. Thirdly, the consumer’s mindset needs to change to accept the mobile device as much more than just a communications tool. There are more but these are three of the most important. Let’s start with the easy enabling factors to address, one and two. Market analysts suggest that Smartphones are about to go mainstream and will be the de facto mobile device within the next twelve months. For the purposes of this posting, let’s simplify the definition of a Smartphone to say it’s a mobile phone that has sufficient processing power, a user friendly graphical interface and ...