As managers, we must strive to motivate and engage team members in order to maximize both their contribution to the enterprise, and in turn, the knowledge and expertise they take from the experience.

For some organisations, it can be as simple as a declaration that in that place, you can achieve your life’s work (as bold as that claim may be). For others, more tangible things need to be attributed to the work environment and processes in order to help the workforce perform efficiently and harmoniously.

In today’s modern business environment, where consumer mobile experiences are influencing expectations and attitudes in the workplace toward enterprise mobility, there are a number of areas that benefit from a successful mobile strategy.

Better Team Engagement

Team engagement doesn’t equate purely to happy campers, but it does generally mean that people care about what they do and — consequently — are more likely to enjoy their personal and professional experiences at work.

Investing in tools that make tedious processes less tedious is one surefire path to satisfaction. Also, cultivating a healthy sense of competition among team members through collaborative experiences can serve to increase overall motivation, maximize engagement with key project goals and even foster a sense of play.

When you consider the potential of mobile solutions to provide instant, “anywhere” access to the work environment, the value of leveraging mobile, cloud-based platforms for collaboration becomes infinitely more apparent: Bring the work closer to the user and in doing so, drive engagement with the work.

Of course, never discount the feeling of satisfaction that many of us experience merely in being able to use our latest gadget on the job — to do the job.

Reduced Waste, Fewer Errors and Less Reworking

Even in 2012, many organizations continue to use paper-based systems for data management. Setting aside the environmental benefits of a digital alternative (although saving the trees can have great impact on people within an organisation’s culture), more often than not, paper-based solutions eat up valuable productivity, often requiring a much greater investment of human capital in the management of important company data.

The extra hours quickly add up, and the repetition or “manual labour” pressure placed on workers leads to greater frustration, and more errors. Consider a company that uses a paper-based system for capturing and recording certain information from field staff. A successful mobile solution could offer the following benefits to staff and the business at large:

Flexibility and Innovation as a Tool for Talent Acquisition and Retention

The modern workplace is increasingly more flexible and innovative when it comes to traditional concepts such as how much time is spent at a desk or in an office. Connected devices, of course, are a key ingredient in this new mobile, or virtual , workplace.  After all, today, once we disconnect the blue network cable from the bulky computer, we — and our work — can go anywhere.

Of course, the Utopian dream of telecommuting and working remotely simply isn’t in the DNA of many organisations, or more specifically, not practical in many roles and job requirements that people have within an organisation. Companies who are willing to embrace innovation and see what is possible, however, can become more effective at acquiring better talent, retaining valuable staff, and maximising the contribution of employees. Finding new and creative ways to work that leverage mobile technology is a great way to keep ahead of the curve and become a place where people aspire to work (and current employees covet their jobs!).

Now that We’re Making Money, and Everyone is Happy …

So far, in this series, we’ve examined how a successful mobile strategy can benefit an organisation’s revenue and its people. In my third and final post on the topic, we’ll look at the benefits mobility can offer a company’s brand.

A brief teaser: It’s not just about enhancing your brand image. It some cases, it’s about creating a new brand from the ground up.

No matter the company, these core business concepts are at the heart of any decision to adopt new technologies or processes aimed towards improving productivity, efficiency or a number of other performance measures.

Companies want to know how technologies will affect their bottom line, and each business perceives the value of technology changes — the return on the investment in new systems, for example — through a different lens.

The Cloud Sherpas Mobility team places these business concepts at the conceptual core of every solution we deliver. Below is the first in a three-part blog series, outlining the three primary tenets of a successful mobile strategy.

Cost Savings

Cost savings are the most immediately reportable and tangible revenue benefit gained through successful mobile integration initiatives.

Consider an organization with a paper-based system that will inevitably be replaced with devices for mobile, or digital, content delivery. There are immediate cost savings pent up in the reduced reliance on paper, ink and printing, as well as time gained for the staff who would otherwise be tasked with production, distribution and management of paper documents.

If these time savings are extended into areas such as reporting (data collection, data quality, report generation and delivery), further tangible cost savings are realized via improvements in data and human resource efficiencies, and value creation is achieved by simply in being able to implement these improvements.

New Customers, Channels and Markets

Mobility solutions can reveal new sales and marketing opportunities, thus opening organizations to new, untapped markets and customers.

With the goal of driving revenue for our customers, Cloud Sherpas examines how each of our solutions might deliver innovation to their organizations and help them gain a competitive advantage in their respective industries. One of our primary goals is to ensure that the mobile solutions we develop integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructure and internal processes, especially those most closely aligned with the bottom line.

For example, an organization may build a new mobile application to empower their field agents with new tools for gathering and reporting market intelligence and data.

What if that solution was innovative enough that the company were able to take it to market as a standalone product and distribute it through mass channels like the  iTunes App Store? A new revenue and marketing channel would have just been created, delivering the client new streams of revenue, not to mention new group of end-user customers with a low cost-of-sale, thanks to the cost-savings pent up in a cloud-based service delivery model.

New Opportunities

Cloud Sherpas focuses on device hardware capabilities such as location, cameras and touch screen gestures, and how these capabilities can create new contexts for common tasks. Optimizing these factors can unlock new opportunities for customers.

For example, what if an inspection team that was out on the road visiting and reviewing sites was able to take photographic evidence of what they saw, and then use the geotag information on that image to also verify their location at the time of inspection?

What might this capability create in terms of new opportunities for that customer?

The outcomes from these new opportunities can feed into any number of revenue-generating or cost-saving activities, new products and innovative services. For instance, the customer could begin to use the geo data to feed new kinds of reports or dashboards, or improve the scheduling and travel requirements for the team.

OK, so what next?

Understanding and demonstrating how a mobility solution can have a positive impact on revenue is an important factor to consider when designing— and selling— that solution to businesses. However, if organizations only focus on revenue as a marker of success, they may be missing out on measuring and utilizing other factors. In my next post, I’ll cover another key area of benefit that comes from a successful mobility strategy: positive impacts for your team.

Each year for the past nine years I’ve travelled to Sydney for the annual webDU (Web Down Under) Conference. For each of the last eight, I’ve been privileged enough to be a speaker at what has become the premier annual Australian web technologies conferences.

To give you some context regarding who participates in webDU, other organisations represented on the speaker roster this year included Adobe, Microsoft, Google, Sencha, YouTube, Nokia, Brightcove and Atlassian.

Each year that I’ve participated, I’ve delivered a mobile-related session, covering a broad selection of topics including design, development (Yes, I used to write code!), team management, UX and strategy. As you can probably imagine, the mobile landscape has changed quite a lot in that time. This year was no exception – my session was titled, “Mr Spock, Consumerise the Enterprise!.”

The focus of my session was to examine how the mobile experiences that have been driving consumer-focused mobile product development are also influencing the enterprise mobility space. (View the slide deck presented at the event after the jump.)

In my role at Cloud Sherpas, this is a topic that comes up in conversation fairly often as it offers one of the key points of distinction that differentiates our Mobility team from other development shops in the market.

Headline points included the following:

Title image composed from webDU @ Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/webdu/

With a focus on data security, mobility, Platform as a Service (PaaS) and migration and deployment services, each 45-minute Webinar is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the most critical benefits, challenges and solutions to consider when working in the cloud.

After the jump, just in case you missed the first semester, you can access video recordings of each Webinar. If you’ve still got questions about the topics covered, it’s not too late to sign up for the second Spring Semester.

Visit the official registration page for Spring Semester 2012 right here.

Watch Video Recordings of Cloud Sherpas’ Spring Semester 2012 Webinar Series

Check back periodically, as we’ll be adding more videos to the Spring Semester playlist on Cloud Sherpas’ official YouTube channel.

We hear questions like…

• We’ve moved much of our Sales & Marketing functions to the cloud. Which other areas of our business should we now move to the cloud?
• I have a long tail of apps to deliver this year. Which ones will best leverage the strengths of the force.com platform?
• Our employees are demanding better mobile access and the ability to much more easily collaborate at work. How can we support them?

As a Platinum Salesforce.com partner and the world’s leading Google apps cloud service provider, we work with two of the biggest heavyweights in both business and cloud computing.

The article that follows focuses on Cloud Sherpas’ capabilities related to Salesforce.com, where many of our customers — and businesses, generally — begin their cloud journeys.

Like many members of our industry, I think it’s safe to assume that Sales Cloud and Service Cloud — Salesforce.com’s core CRM and Customer Service offerings, respectively — combined, serve as the gateway for many businesses to an even more extensive presence in the cloud.

Force.com, the world’s leading cloud platform for business apps, offers the infrastructure upon which both Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are built, and if you happen to be using either solution, Force.com may be the next logical destination on your company’s journey further into the cloud.

Force.com hosts more than 200,000 business applications from both Salesforce.com partners and independent software vendors.

For larger organizations ready to ‘make the migration,’ the smartest strategy is often to begin by first buffering inflexible legacy applications with a layer of dynamic cloud solutions that facilitate a more agile and collaborative business process than would be possible using a non-cloud-based solution. These ‘Volatile Applications,’ as they are sometimes referred to, give both users and ISVs the ability to adapt, scale and evolve quickly — a key selling point for building and hosting applications on the force.com platform.

Listed below are the four “sweet spots” we’ve seen for businesses using the force.com platform:

1. Sharing new or existing information with a wider audience

Force.com’s single platform and granular access control can be used to rapidly provide access to multiple user groups. Businesses can customize the level of access granted to any number of user types, allowing customers to self-serve by provisioning access to a comprehensive knowledge base, for example, while dedicating other areas of their solution to sales and service information accessible only to key partners and vendors.

2. Anything that needs to be mobile or collaborative

All apps that are built on Force.com have built-in features that leverage Chatter — salesforce.com’s cross-platform compatible enterprise collaboration tool —  and are thus available on most popular mobile devices.

3. Managing user-driven business processes

Process-oriented apps are a popular use case for force.com apps, as they leverage the business service layer of the force platform with workflow, approvals and custom code. Typical apps have covered Recruiting, Bug Tracking, Expense Management and Procurement.

4. Rebuilding simple ‘desktop’ apps

Force.com’s secure, reliable and scalable infrastructure allows for a much more organic approach to product lifecycle management. Unencumbered by native, platform-specific development requirements, businesses can leverage Force.com’s flexible Web-based platform to build — and build onto — any application. For example, say you and a few team members create a simple software application that serves as little more than a project discussion board but quickly grows into a central database for resources that would logically be available to all employees. In this scenario, on Force.com, it wouldn’t take much to take what started as just a spreadsheet and turn it into a robust, enterprise-ready, collaborative application for the whole organisation.

These are just a few highlights of the types of apps we see businesses creating with the  force.com platform.

Where have you found a sweet spot for the force.com platform?

Remember those days? Sure you do!

Though surely there’s still a go-it-alone innovator or two making breakthroughs in science and technology somewhere in the world, today, the majority of us work in tandem — with colleagues, customers and partners, often located halfway around the world — to come up with the best and brightest solutions to our problems, business or otherwise.

And we welcome this new collaborative process, armed with modern research suggesting that just about any problem is most efficiently solved through an open, free-flowing exchange of ideas.

For global enterprise on the cutting edge of collaboration technologies, maximizing user-driven innovation has meant breaking free of anchored, stand-alone work places to adopt dynamic, virtual collaborative spaces. So why shouldn’t the tools we use follow the same path?

New Tools for New Times

As it’s grown and matured during the last several years, Google Docs has offered me an increasingly dynamic platform to share ideas with colleagues. My professional bias aside, I truly believe the web app is one of the most revolutionary forms of communication to hit mainstream business since the post-it note (circa 1980, for the curious).

For those unfamiliar with Google Docs, it’s an online word processor, spreadsheet and presentation editor with a feature set that closely mimics that of comparable desktop solutions. The Web app allows teams to create, store and share documents and collections instantly — and securely — and work, simultaneously, in a single document in often creepily-real time.

You can create new docs from scratch or upload existing files, running the gamut of popular formats, to edit from within the Google Docs application. There’s no software to download, and all your work is stored securely on Google’s massive server farms in who-knows-where, and accessible any time, from just about any device. (Like!)

No joke, time and time again, Google Docs has proven to be the most efficient way to manage content for the awesome team of geeks I work with here in Cloud Sherpas’ Atlanta office.

By streamlining the document creation process on the Web, there’s no waiting on the latest version of a scope doc or customer request from another team member; no rifling through email or shared drives to find the draft I need; no annoying uploading, downloading or checking in and out, or merging or tracking changes.  It’s just there — all the time, when and wherever you need it.

Docs just makes so much sense to me now, little else does when it comes to alternative project management solutions.

If you haven’t tried it before, give Docs a chance. It’s an often-bizarre, often-enlightening exercise in team collaboration that’s also — final shameless product plug of the post — incredibly easy to get started with.

Got questions about Google Docs? Submit them in the Comments below, and let’s have a conversation!

One of the greatest rewards I’ve discovered in being a part of the Cloud Sherpas global family lies, perhaps surprisingly, in our company culture, which encourages employees to give back to their local communities in much the same way we share our knowledge and expertise to customers. (Crazy idea, right?!)

To contribute something with a positive, lasting impact to society — or, even, to offer something of unique, lasting value within the global cloud marketplace — means cultivating a shared vision across our organization that transcends geographic barriers and professional responsibilities.

Cloud Sherpas Philanthropy, an entirely employee-operated group charged with organizing company-wide initiatives in support of charitable causes and nonprofit organizations, is one living example of how our company’s internal culture already seems destined to thrive and flourish under the Cloud Sherpas brand following the merger of Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne in March.

A Brief History of Philanthropy

Nearly two years ago, in October 2010, a group of then-GlobalOne employees here in Cloud Sherpas’ Manila offices organized an impromptu day of volunteer work at a local foundation that cares for lost, neglected and abandoned children.

The heart-wrenching/hilarious/passionate tale of our enlightening experience that day — not to mention a few pictures of some truly adorable children thrown in for good measure — bore an immediate impact on other members of our team, many of whom joined us as we volunteered again.

And again.

And again — until, one day, a modest group of five coworkers (who also just happened to have become friends in their work together at GlobalOne) had grown into a group of 20, bonded by our contributions to the community and committed to facilitating longterm philanthropic initiatives for the company at large.

It wasn’t long before our leadership team took notice of our enterprising spirit, and with their full support, the Philanthropy project was born.

A Culture of Passion

Today, our team here in Makati City, a large suburb of Manila, takes an active role in community service by participating in volunteer and fundraising activities for various nonprofit organizations, including children’s homes and public daycare centers; we also help out underprivileged families in various surrounding communities.

Our goal is never only to aid those less fortunate than us, but also to facilitate awareness — at work, and in both the local and global communities — of philanthropic causes and other social development initiatives in hopes that we might inspire others to follow in our footsteps.

I was thus elated to discover one day just a few weeks ago, after sending a simple email introducing the Philanthropy program to a couple of legacy Cloud Sherpas based in our Atlanta headquarters, that philanthropy was already high on their list of priorities. They shared some of their own recent work in promoting charitable causes on behalf of Cloud Sherpas, and I — and some of my team members — offered further insights into what we’ve endeavored to accomplish in the Philippines with regard to the Philanthropy project.

In the series of emails that have followed, which have covered everything from new marketing projects to coordinating content for this blog, I realized that our shared vision extended well beyond our belief in the value of collaborative philanthropy (to both community and company). It’s just as apparent in our common understanding, and passionate support, of the core tenets of social collaboration itself, many of which now provide the framework for Cloud Sherpas’ new business.

Through the conversation that continues today — across timezones, messaging systems and social networks — I believe we’ve experienced some sense of mutual affirmation that the physical distance between us is no match for the length of time it takes to type a quick email or tweet to one another.

It’s clear that we all — new Sherpas and old — take very seriously the responsibility we inherit as ambassadors of global business: To exemplify social leadership and to become not merely the voices of change, but the change, itself.

Today, I am proud to call myself a Cloud Sherpa: 1 month, 6 days, and counting.

More Background on Cloud Sherpas Philanthropy

The Cloud Sherpas Philanthropy group has participated in several outreach missions, some of which require us to travel to remote underprivileged communities in the Philippines where basic needs are scarce.

The volunteers on their way to Maharlika Paradise, Daycare Center. A remote community in one of the provinces in the Philippines.

Our contributions — trivial though they may be in the grander scheme of things — empower us with a sense of pride and passion for what we do, which, at its core is little more than helping the less fortunate to [find] hold tight to life’s many joys — in essence: Hope.

A smile can often inspire as much gratitude as the donation of food, or money or clothes. A smile exchanged, however, brings me so much joy, sometimes I think the people we support on each Philanthropy mission are giving us far more than we could ever hope to give them: A sense of fulfillment, of purpose and of….

The volunteers with the families of the Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette community.

Beyond the Missions

Cloud Sherpas Philanthropy aspires to cultivate volunteers’ talent and creativity to make a lasting impact on the communities they serve, and to leave a mark of generosity that others can emulate and pay forward. The culture within Cloud Sherpas gives the employees an opportunity to become better citizens of society, to be advocates of sharing and caring and to become the voices of change.

Immediately following the announcement of Cloud Sherpas’ merger with GlobalOne on March 6, Event Coordinator and Social Media Marketing Manger Brittany Hall (@brittany_hall) and Senior Consultant Cyndi Zaino (@cyndizaino) invited members of Cloud Sherpas’ legacy teams across the world, as well as representatives of GlobalOne’s various offices in North America and Southeast Asia, to share their thoughts on what opportunities might lie ahead as Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne joined together in unified mission. After the jump, read a sampling of some of the comments she received in response to the question from legacy Cloud Sherpas:

After the jump, read a sampling of some of the comments she received in response to the question from former GlobalOne employees:

“How Do You Think You and Your Team Will Benefit from the Merger?”

Stay tuned for Part 3, in which Manila-based marketing executive Karen Tomas will offer a unique perspective about one particular aspect of GlobalOne’s corporate culture that will live on through Cloud Sherpas. (Click here to read Part 1 in the series, which highlights several legacy Cloud Sherpas employees’ perspectives.)

Dale Rankine
Senior Mobility Consultant
Sydney

“The Mobility division looks forward to leveraging Cloud Sherpas’ strategic partnership with Google to help our team grow and develop our existing capabilities on the Andoid platform for mobile development.”

David Pauli
Enterprise Architect
San Francisco

“The Global Architecture group will be able to develop robust, cross-organizational solutions that can deliver tremendous value utilizing a world-class family of technologies and incredibly talented people. Customers will now have a partner to as a single point of contact to both architect and deliver cross-platform compatible solutions from the web-enabled laptop and mobile devices through the enterprise application stack; true value leveraging best of class people and technologies.”

Chuck Greiner
Senior Manager
New York City

“Participating and learning new technologies; collaborating with Cloud Sherpas in developing out new sales offerings; understanding the implementation challenges, best practices and solutions related to Google Apps — all of this will naturally expand our capabilities and help us in our mission to maximize the value of the cloud solutions we provide to our customers.”

Ellard Capiral
Technical Lead
Makati City (Manila)

“Its a great opportunity for members of our team to learn Google Apps. This is the future of the industry, and getting started on this platform represents a huge step toward greater success in the cloud. Together, GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas — and their strategic partnerships with Salesforce.com and Google, respectively — undoubtedly will allow our combined enterprise to offer a broader spectrum of services to both new and existing customers, establishing a very competitive position for the new Cloud Sherpas within the marketplace.”

Karen Tomas
Marketing Executive,
Makati City (Manila)

“More heads combined create a more vibrant organization. I think the merger will help produce more creative outlets for the entire marketing team here in Manila while also helping individual members to hone new skills and to become even more competent in their existing areas of expertise. After all, this merger has just created a one-stop-shop for cloud services and solutions — there’s literally a world of new opportunity now awaiting us.”

Immediately following the announcement of Cloud Sherpas’ merger with GlobalOne on March 6, Event Coordinator and Social Media Marketing Manger Brittany Hall (@brittany_hall) and Senior Consultant Cyndi Zaino (@cyndizaino) invited members of Cloud Sherpas’ legacy teams across the world, as well as representatives of GlobalOne’s various offices in North America and Southeast Asia, to share their thoughts on what opportunities might lie ahead as Cloud Sherpas and GlobalOne joined together in unified mission. After the jump, read a sampling of some of the comments she received in response to the question from legacy Cloud Sherpas:

“What about the merger are you most excited about?”

Stay tuned for Part 2, in which we’ll offer comments from the GlobalOne perspective.

Daragh McGrath
Certified Google Apps Deployment Specialist,
Sydney

“It’s been an amazing journey so far, and I can’t wait to continue it. Personally, having started out as one of just two people in a tiny services office in Sydney — just 8 short months ago — I am exceptionally excited about walking into a busy, vibrant office full of hard working Sherpas. I also look forward to the potential opportunities to broaden my horizon working with other technologies and offerings from some amazing partners that will be added to the mix as a result of our coming together… Being part of the APAC [Asia Pacific] team, based in Australia, and seeing how quickly our company has grown globally during the last several months, especially in this part of the world, has been exceptionally satisfying and rewarding. Now, as part of a much larger team with increased depth, breadth and capability — along with a much stronger, more diverse product offering — I can’t wait to find out what’s next.”

Carly Hartwick,
Sales Operations Manager
Atlanta

“The chance to learn more and grow my skill set as well as make new friends and have fun while doing all of it! I can’t wait to see what the “powerhouse” that is the new Cloud Sherpas will look like just a year from now!”

Mariana McCready,
Collaboration Consultant,
Atlanta

I see a lot of opportunity for integration between the Google Apps and Salesforce.com platforms, primarily in regard to solutions for business collaboration. As more and more businesses move to the cloud, they will demand solutions that easily integrate with non-vertical products and services. I see the merger as an opportunity to enable our team to better understand how each of these disparate systems can work together to provide our customers with even more responsive solutions.

I look forward to the exchange of knowledge and skills with our counterparts at GlobalOne that will no doubt lead us to these solutions.

Diego Amenta,
Sr. Project Manager
Atlanta

“Among other things, I’m hopeful that the merger will allow the app development teams from GlobalOne and Cloud Sherpas to “cross-pollinate” and to come up with best practices to work with both Cloud-based offerings, Salesforce.com and Google platforms, in a fluid, consistent process for collaboration. In essence, I think our target goal is the creation of a sort of macro-Cloud for customers who rely on cloud offerings from both Google and SFDC.”

Brad Millard,
National Account Manager
Atlanta

“I think we’ll benefit in several ways. With the merger, we’ve diversified our product offerings and moved from a single platform cloud service provider to one with much broader expertise that extends across the entire ecosystems of two of the most dominant cloud platforms in the marketplace. From an operations standpoint, I look forward to working with a team that specializes in Salesforce.com products and can thus help us in better integrating that platform into our daily workflow.

While Google’s focus on social networking is evident (we love the new G+ UI released today!), we were surprised to read Clint’s assertion that investment in one area must detract from another. The truth is, on the front-lines of the Google Enterprise ecosystem we’re seeing something completely different.

For the outsider looking in, one doesn’t need to look farther than the Google Enterprise blog to see Google’s continued investment in the Google Apps business. New products such as Google Vault that adds archiving, retention and ediscovery capabilities and Google Cloud Storage that enables developers to store and access massive amounts of data on Google’s infrastructure are just two recent additions to their cloud platform that signal investment in the future. Dive deeper into the blog and you’ll see a four-year track record that indicates the same. These frequent updates suggest quite the opposite of Boulton’s conclusion and point to the fact that Google is continuing to invest in Apps, not pull away from it.

Cloud Sherpas’ business is a proxy for Google’s, and we’re seeing acceleration in the market. Revenue is up 200% from 2010 to 2011, our pipeline is growing and we’re seeing more businesses make the switch to Google Apps quarter after quarter. Household names from across industries are switching to Google Apps, placing their faith in the future of Google’s enterprise cloud offering, just as we and hundreds of Google Apps partners have done from Day One.

We work side-by-side with Google on a daily basis and we see them making significant investments in Apps every day. From increasing the number of employees worldwide that support Apps to developing new technology and updating the suite on a regular basis, Google has not signaled any deviation from its commitment to continuing to support and develop the Apps suite.

Finally, Boulton supports his theory with the assertion that recent management changes within Google indicate a shift in priorities.  While we were disappointed to hear the news of David Girouard’s departure, we view Google’s decision to appoint Amit Singh, a proven Oracle sales leader, to the helm as a sign of significant acceleration. Singh is dedicated to growing the Apps business worldwide and we see that commitment every day in the field.

We know that the future of millions of businesses worldwide– including ours– depends on Google Apps, and we’re confident Boulton will not see his cloudy prediction come to fruition.