A Partnership Model for Augmented Reality Enterprise Deployments

Due to the potential to radically change user engagement, Augmented Reality has received considerable and growing attention in recent months. Pokémon Go certainly has helped and, in turn, generated many expectations for the advancement of AR-based solutions. In fact, the game has provided the industry with a long overdue injection of mass appeal and as a result, significant investment from (and among) tech giants around the world.

From corner shops to large utility providers, the spike in popularity of this technology has everyone buzzing about how it could improve their business. The flexibility of implementation, from improving processes to stand-out marketing solutions, has also altered the expectations of these prospective clients as they seek personalized enterprise-level AR-based solutions. Consequently, the time has come for vendors and suppliers to consider a new model when it comes to managing customer expectations.

When deploying Augmented Reality solutions in an enterprise context, it is essential to build strong partnerships with your customers, and in many cases to take on the role of a trusted advisor. This becomes more important through the stages of delivering a project—starting with defining a proof of concept (POC) to implement bleeding edge solutions with operational teams and ultimately end users, who in fact are the actual users of the technology.

While the primary value of Augmented Reality systems is to allow for the contextual overlay of information to enable better decision making, the visual data overlay and various data sources and devices that trigger location sensors all come into play—converging in the form of a complex mesh. Vendors must note that partnerships are key to solving the pieces of this puzzle.

Service Delivery—Creating Value from the Complex Mesh

This complex mesh is what ultimately garners value as the assimilation of these technologies creates new and innovative social and business ecosystems and associated processes. When addressing enterprise adaptation, one must be aware of the following questions:

• How best can value be driven into workable solutions in an enterprise?
• How well does it integrate with existing legacy systems?
• Would new skills be required to introduce and manage the change?
• Does the solution deliver increased productivity or efficiencies, i.e., better utilization of resources or allow for better decision making through information?
• Does the solution enable new revenue models for the organization that are consistent with the existing product and service offerings?
• In turn, how does this solution affect the profitability of the organization?
• Last, but not least, is the business rationale clear for the implementation of such a solution?

The move towards customer-centric systems means that your customer (or your customer’s customer) is at the center of all decision making. This may be a shift from their existing system practices, meaning it’s even more critical that the chosen change management process be well aligned to the client’s corporate culture.

The Client’s Point of View—Questions to Ask When Going Beyond the POC

Some of the questions that vendors need to consider when it comes to implementing the solution beyond the POC are:

• What is changing?
• Why are we making the change?
• Who will be impacted by the change?
• How will they react to the change?
• What can we do to proactively identify and mitigate their resistance to the change?
• Will the solution introduce new business or revenue models?

Working as one with your customers through innovations to operations is a key factor for success. The complex mesh of AR, VR, IoT and Big Data technologies makes this even more critical as enterprises see an integration of their digital content, systems and processes.

It is essential to take a partnership mindset—where the Augmented Reality innovation solution is built both for and with the customer, and through a customer-implemented change management process—to quickly and easily create ROI as well as tangible, actionable outcomes.