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Technology to enable mobile and remote working has rapidly penetrated business. It is common to find one-third or more of company employees now equipped with mobile data devices. In many ways, enterprises are increasingly virtual. While on the road, sales and service teams access key network applications on demand and communicate with customers and colleagues using mobile devices. Contact center agents field and respond to customer inquiries from their homes. Executives keep up with email and access critical documents while traveling.
The personal productivity of employees has increased across regions and industries as their work continues uninterrupted beyond the company walls. “Employees can be productive no matter where they are — starting from a conference room 50 yards from their desks,” says Philippe Winthrop, Director of Wireless and Mobility Research at Aberdeen Group, an IT research firm.
Mid-market companies with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion per year are driving the growth in mobile technology, according to an Aberdeen report.1 Today a greater proportion of the mid-market segment workforce is mobile compared to large organizations.
EXPLORING NEW TERRITORIES
The marriage of mobile technology with IP networks is opening up new horizons of business performance enhancement. Firms now are branching out in their use of mobile applications, and the mobile device has become more than a basic productivity tool. Applications that integrate video and data are being set up to link together mobile staff scattered across the globe or to run interactive training sessions. Workers in the oil industry, for example, can use mobile devices to immediately tap colleagues’ expertise or to access crucial technical data from an IP network, even from a North Sea rig 100 miles off the coast of Scotland.
The migration of mobile applications to converged IP networks is fast gathering momentum, as a global survey of senior executives by the Economist Intelligence Unit and AT&T shows.2 Fewer than one in five firms polled had made the move by mid-2006, but, by 2008, this will have risen to 72 percent. The flexibility afforded by IP will facilitate the next phase. The race is now on to enable mobile devices to capture vital information at the source and turn it into actionable data for use by management.
Companies such as the U.S. food supplier Tasty Baking are using second-generation mobile devices, coupled with IP networking, to add a new dimension to the work of mobile staff (see box). They can now capture data in the field and feed it back to other groups in the company, who are able to use it to support decision making. Others are tracking information scanned via radio-frequency identification (RFID) devices to speed and track the flow of goods through the supply chain.
MOVING CLOSER TO THE CUSTOMER
All of this information can be used to give the customer a better deal. Improving customer service through mobile technology is a key area of exploration today, across industries. For example, a VIP customer at a large football stadium can be recognized via a steward’s PDA and ushered into the right lounge.
CRM data is the main application for handheld devices at the global investment bank Merrill Lynch, according to the Principal Architect for IT Systems in EMEA, Rupert Brown. “When mobile employees are visiting clients, they’ve got the relevant data at hand,” he says. “The benefit is mainly qualitative — knowing what the customer issues are.” Brown describes the firm’s mobile initiatives as “business innovation-led”. Government employees also increasingly use mobile applications to deliver public services to their customers. The Oakland County government in the state of Michigan in the U.S. helps local building contractors save time with a new system implemented for the government’s mobile workers. Field inspectors now are able to give on-the-spot approval for work on building sites; diagrams are sketched and sent off, and then checked and certified at county headquarters, greatly accelerating the processing time.
Increasingly, companies need to gear themselves to offer mobile services to communicate with customers in a multichannel world. For example, hotel confirmations can be sent to guests’ PDAs, along with a list of local attractions. British Airways informs passengers of impending flight delays by sending text messages to their mobile phones.
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