The Impact of Mobile Technology on Business Processes Results from 5 Case Studies

Implementation of mobile-integrated business processes within corporate IT-systems is a major and still increasing issue. Although the usage of mobile technologies for IT management and improvement of business processes is far behind expectations, still little research has been done in analyzing critical success factors for mobile technology acceptance and usage when replacing a former paper-based process within the IT-service domain. In this contribution we identify major business metrics which are influenced by mobile tool integration into mobile business processes. Therefore a mobile workforce solution for IT-service technicians has been implemented and usability tested. The deployment of the mobile workforce solution has been investigated in two industrial case studies in two different companies. Additionally mobile tool deployment of different systems in three technical customer service companies has been investigated through exploratory case study research. The results show that (a) same archetypical business process metrics are affected after mobile tool deployment and (b) user involvement in business process reengineering and tool development fosters tool acceptance and usage.