Mark Dajani is Senior Vice President of Global Information Systems for Kraft Foods, the largest food company in North America and second largest in the world. When faced with requests to allow employees access to enterprise systems from their iPhones, he saw two opportunities: to provide better internal communications and to offer a new way to reach out to customers.
Internal support for the iPhone
Kraft supports the iPhone in two ways. First, it provides pre-configured iPhones to specific groups within the company. Second, it maintains a Web page that supports individual employees who have purchased their own iPhones. Both solutions allow employees to access Kraft’s Exchange servers as well as other important company information. The CEO and other executives at Kraft can create audio messages (a.k.a. “Kraft Casts”) that employees can listen to on the iPhone and keep current on the latest corporate strategies and branding initiatives.
According to Dave Diedrich, Vice President of Information Systems, the iPhone, “opens our employees’ eyes to what is possible in their jobs…” and provides a “tremendous opportunity for us to increase productivity by removing the barriers of location…With iPhone, employees can be at home, on the road, with a customer, and still provide the services they need to make Kraft successful.”
By listening to requests from some of the 100,000 worldwide employees of Kraft Foods, and by looking at the new features available in iPhone 2.0, last year Dajani concluded that the iPhone was truly “enterprise ready. The e-mail, calendar, contacts, and security components (that) were critical for Kraft’s wide-scale deployment” existed. Kraft found an innovative and potentially rewarding place for the iPhone in the enterprise.
