Profitability of mobility

Advances in mobile technology and the rise of a porous business world have led to an increase of workers on
the move. While currently the typical profile of a mobile worker is a full-time male manager, this is rapidly changing. A study conducted by Cisco into the mobile workforce predicts that within the next year, one quarter of the world's workers will be mobile. "The anytime, any place mantra has been established due to the ubiquity of the internet and other technologies that enable true mobility," says Ali Amer, Vice President, Motorola Networks.

According to Hassan Hamadani, Middle East Marketing Manager for Nortel, the popularity of mobile working is based
on a very logical question: why should someone drive to the office to talk on the phone and use a computer if they have a computer and phone at home? Technology has allowed users to switch from desktops to laptops, and the advances in phone technology mean that employees can now use their mobile phones to send e-mail, open documents and communicate easily with their employer
and clients.

A study by The Economist Intelligence Unit into the mobile workforce found that in nearly half of the surveyed firms globally, the majority of employees today use allocated mobile devices (including phones, BlackBerrys, voice-enabled personal digital assistants and WiFi-enabled laptops). This is expected to be the case in more than 70 per cent of surveyed firms within four years.

According to the report, accessing e-mail, managing the personal calendar and keeping in touch with colleagues via messaging are currently the most popular mobile applications among executives. In addition to mobiles and laptops, wireless technology has further expanded the possibilities of mobile working. For employees this means being able to read e-mail with a BlackBerry or other handheld device, or to access network applications using a WiFi-enabled laptop.

An increasing number of organisations now recognise the wide range of advantages that mobile working offers. According to Hamadani, mobile employees are more likely than before to stay with their companies.

"From the corporation side mobile working impacts profitability by reducing annual real estate costs, helps increase productivity due to fewer interruptions, better use of time, less time lost due to weather problems, and enhances employee retention," he says.

Joe Devassy, Regional Manager for Business Mobility, Nokia ME and Africa, agrees companies that encourage mobile working benefit from increased productivity.

"Organisations of all types and sizes can benefit greatly from mobility through increased flexibility and responsiveness," he says. "Some companies might leverage mobility on a large-scale basis, using advanced business applications with the sales force out in the field logging customer activity every hour, while other companies might just use mobility for checking e-mails out of the office or away from the desk."

Despite the myriad of advantages that mobile working offers, there are still a range of challenges that need to be overcome before it can completely match the office experience. For example, in the region there is a distinct lack of Wi-Fi connectivity.

"This region's mobile workers face problems such as expensive internet on the road. There is also a lack of internet hot spots," says Joe Sfeir, Marketing Manager, ABM. Research by IBM suggests that more than half of mobile workers find it difficult to participate in meetings while working remotely — many complain of ‘fighting'
to get online. The lack of frequent exposure to company information and gossip also causes remote workers to feel
isolated from their informal networks at work.

Back-up plans in place

Organisations face their own share of problems with mobile working. Devassy believes that many companies are reluctant to grasp the competitive opportunity and challenge of greater mobility because of doubts over security, installations and deployment costs and manageability.

However, due to the advances in technology, with the right IT management, organisations can apply the right security measures and benefit from mobile working.

"Effective device management for laptops and other mobile devices will provide such capabilities as inventory reporting, device back-up and restore, device provisioning and configuration, software updating, diagnostic and repair services and remote device lock and wipe," says Devassy.

"With device management, should an employee's mobile device containing confidential data be lost or stolen, the IT administrator can quickly take action by remotely applying a hard reset that would wipe all date from the device."
Another challenge faced is finding the technology that will support core enterprise applications such as CRM and ERP while on the go. As mobile device penetration nears saturation, the focus is switching to the services that run on these devices.

Almost half the executives surveyed in The Economist Intelligence Unit Business in Motion study believe providing mobile access to CRM and ERP is the most important measure companies can take to increase productivity gains from mobile technology in the future.

However, initial efforts in this direction appear to have yielded mixed results: fewer than seven per cent of executives are frequent users of mobile CRM themselves, while accessing enterprise applications is considered the most difficult operation to perform on mobile devices.

"CRM is good when used on laptops, but weak on mobiles," explains Sfeir. "The application should be used through 3G networks instead of using an office network."

The Economist study found that while in the future mobile workers will still use similar mobile applications to the ones in use now, a significant proportion of respondents also expect to become frequent users of mobile voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing.

They also hold out hope for much greater use, by sales and service teams, of mobile CRM tools. According to Navin Tikoo, PSG Business Development Manager, HP Middle East, the future of effective mobile working rests with interconnectable and user-friendly applications.

"Mobile workers need to operate and have access to all tools desk-based workers have access to; let it be their inbox, their intranet or their CRM and data entry/collection tools," he says. "In the future we can see companies consolidating several applications and offering end-to-end easy solutions like SAP is offering in other fields."