Mobile Workforce: Key Business Driver For Enterprises

’Improving the effectiveness of enterprise workforce’ ranked fourth among the top 10 business priorities of CIOs in a 2007 Gartner survey, which covered almost 1,400 CIOs. Experts observe that mobile workers are often valuable enterprise assets. This has provoked the growth of mobile enterprise applications worldwide. Nick Jones, VP and distinguished analyst, Gartner, discusses the growing trend of empowering a mobile workforce and the resulting challenges for enterprises in a discussion with Biztech2.0.

How do mobile workers represent a huge opportunity for enterprises?

All though organisations have automated a lot of processes, which employees use on their desks, we now have an increasingly large number of people, who are not on their desks at all times. In a country like India, you can find a large number of sales people and engineers, who are constantly on the move. A mobile workforce has become a key business driver for enterprises today. Organisations are looking forward to increase the productivity of this significant group of workers.

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What benefits does mobility bring for the enterprise?

The benefits of mobility can be categorised into three layers. The bottom layer consists of organisations, which just want to run their business better. They are doing the same activities, but now they want to do them more efficiently. Things like mobile e-mail, data cards in laptops to access the corporate network, etc represent the first level of opportunity.

The second layer consists of companies, which are interested in growing their business and improving productivity. They want their sales people to see more clients in a week. This is where a lot of mobile sales force and field force automation tools are being used to enhance productivity.
The third layer is riskier and speculative at this stage; however, it presents a huge opportunity to completely transform the business. It involves usage of mobile technologies in entirely new ways. For example, take any product, add a network to it and you can turn it into a service. The product is offered through a rental model instead of a sales model. In some countries, we have started seeing things like pay-per-use washing machines, which are enabled by wireless technologies.

What are some of the major challenges of connecting a mobile workforce?

There is a mixture of technical and sociological challenges. Technical challenges involve development of new applications for rapidly evolving mobile devices, understanding new application architectures for mobiles and new sets of development tools. CIOs need to prepare their organisations for such changes; they also need to integrate these applications with the overall architecture of the organisation.

India is also facing major challenges on the networking and connectivity front. In our interaction with CIOs, we have noticed that their desire to deliver services is way ahead of what current networks can support. The countries, which have 3G networks, are able to do more things on this front. Though networking technologies are getting better, the Indian government has to be convinced to allow 3G networking in the country.

An often neglected area, which IT people tend to forget, is the social aspect of connecting a mobile workforce. Companies, which desire to have a good return on investment (RoI) on mobile applications, often change their business processes, which may stop people from visiting the office for taking their assignments. However, such people might have liked to visit the office to meet their colleagues and share experiences with them. Thus, these new technologies involve sociological challenges, which people may or may not be comfortable with.

What are some of the security issues pertaining to mobile connectivity?

All though there are a small number of viruses, which can influence mobile devices, several new technical threats are expected to enter the mobile space. There are social threats like privacy of employees. For example, some of the new mobile applications can track employee locations. Some workers may not like their location to be tracked, especially after working hours.

Security, I think is not as serious a problem today as it was a few years back. Some years ago, the primary concern was: ‘Can I make the mobile device secure?’ Today, it is more about how much cost is involved in making mobile devices secure. The devices are certainly getting much more secure with time; RIM devices have always been very secure.

Which verticals will aggressively adopt mobile technologies?

Utility companies including power, water and gas supply, which have huge mobile workforces and engineers are the most likely to adopt mobility solutions. Companies dealing with transport and logistics need mobility solutions to track their trucks, to prevent their trucks from being stolen etc. People are beginning to appreciate the potential of mobile devices as generic collaboration tools. Mobility solutions allow them to keep in touch, to check documents and access corporate portals from anywhere, at anytime. We have also started seeing things like Presence-enabled applications and portal applications being adopted for more collaborative purposes.

What precaution needs to be taken while developing a mobile environment?

CIOs need to identify the application requirements of their mobile workforce and also need to select the right technology and right processes to deliver these solutions. With their huge workforce sizes, Indian companies also face cost constraints in making mobility solutions available. When companies are not making huge amounts of revenues from each worker, they definitely can’t provide expensive laptops to everyone. So perhaps they need to choose a lower cost device for this group of employees.

The companies need to be more tactical about network connectivity. They can make use of a ‘mix and match’ strategy by using cellular as well as satellite networks for enabling mobile solutions.

What is your take on the Wimax Market in India?

I think India is in an interesting situation. As I said earlier, current networks in the country really lack what people expect out of them. Indian roads do not have good copper networks, which makes wireless technologies like Wimax more apt for the country. Wimax has a lot of potential in India than in Europe or America, but it is again subject to regulations. So I see more of regulatory challenges on this front than technological challenges.