Study gains in staff productivity and returns before buying mobile
equipment
Although corporate spending on mobile access to business
applications remains a tiny fraction of what firms spend on mobile
voice services, companies are beginning to implement it to improve
productivity and gain competitive advantage.
However, the business case remains unclear to many large
organisations, which are uncertain as to which employee functions
and applications would deliver most benefit and which devices and
networks can deliver such access most effectively.
IT leaders are still cautious about investing in new technology
without a clear understanding of how it delivers better employee
productivity and a return on investment.
Even where there is clear potential return, budget pressures still
prevent opportunities from being exploited. But businesses
considering using mobile access to applications can gain
quantitative and qualitative benefits.
Quantitative benefits rely either on the business achieving
increased revenues or on cutting costs by raising employee
productivity. These are dependent on the level of productivity
improvement achieved and the salary and overhead costs.
Qualitative benefits include improving levels of customer
satisfaction and customer perception of the business. Against these
benefits, corporates must weigh up the costs of hardware, user
training and support. These costs will occur both as a one-off at
deployment and over time as replacements, software, connectivity,
application integration and device configuration become
necessary.
A major consideration for most companies is the cost of providing
devices such as PDAs and laptops. Where employees already own these
devices, the cost of implementing mobile access is reduced.
There are significant economies of scale for deployments of 250
users or more, as fixed implementation costs are spread out.
However, most mobile access deployments have tended to trial
services with about 50 users, which is unlikely to provide a full
picture of the cost per employee of a large-scale
implementation.
Suppliers are developing pro-ducts to support mobile app-lication
access. For example, Hewlett-Packard and Symbol can support a wide
range of protocols, including GPRS, Bluetooth and 802.11b on a
single device.
Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel and SAP have "mobile-enabled" their
software, and niche suppliers such as Commtag, RIM, Smartner and
Sybase have developed specialist applications.
Most major mobile service providers are trying to cross-sell basic
mobile applications such as e-mail, and all promote the potential
of their products to improve employee productivity.
However, the bottom line remains that for a business to gain a
return on investment from a mobile application, employee
productivity must be sufficiently increased to cover the cost of
deployment.
A study on the return on investment carried out by Analysys
Research indicated that, where appropriate access equipment already
exists, an improvement of employee productivity of between 0.6% and
1.4% (14 to 32 minutes per week) is required to achieve a
break-even return, depending on the scope and scale of the
deployment.
However, where equipment must be purchased, a substantially higher
improvement is needed - between 1.7% and 3.4% (38 minutes to one
hour 17 minutes per week).
Jonathan Tee is senior analyst at Analysys
Researchwww.analysys.com