Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

“We think about associate-level mobility in three ways. There are associates in the store, where they are using a mobile device, perhaps even an associate in the supply chain in a warehouse or distribution facility or wherever. They’re using the device in some operational capacity to fulfill a business mission. This is where we enjoy the unparalleled ease of being able to dictate exactly what device that associate is going to use. We have total control over that environment: We can do anything we want,” Sajor said. “The second modality is, for example, field management or store management, [people] who may not be in the store, but yet we’re providing some level of functionality to them around reporting analytics, whatever it might be. We might have slightly less control over the device, but we usually do have pretty good control over the application and how that might be rendered.”

Sajor then argued that it’s the next level down where things get tricky. “The third level is what you might call casual associate usage. So you have an associate who wants to perform an HR function, like perhaps they want to change benefit selection or view their work schedule. To do something that would fall into that personal associate task realm where you have almost no control over the device and, therefore, you have to go for the lowest common denominator that you’re comfortable with,” he said.

Where should a chain draw the line? For that third functional group, it could be fairly extreme.

“It might not be unreasonable to say, ‘OK. If you want to use an associate HR function in a remote mobile context, feel free to do so. But your minimum level of capability of your device is X. And if you aren’t comfortable with that, or if you don’t have that [ability], then you’re free to go to the back of the store or go to whatever corporate facility is available to you and perform those functions there,” Sajor said. “I don’t necessarily feel obligated to satisfy every device on every network everywhere in the world. Total ubiquity in that case, to me, is not mandatory. We certainly don’t want to disappoint people by picking too narrow a slice. But it doesn’t have to be everything.”