The 10 November meeting of the CW500 Club considered the
benefits of mobile computing.
Jenny Sener, director of ICT at OCS, gave a summary why it had
opted for mobile computing for its workforce. OCS (One Complete
Solution) is a supplier of property support services, including
hygiene, cleaning, catering, security, laundries, transport
services and technical services.
The UK business has a turnover of about £500m, with 30,000
staff. It also has a network of wholly-owned companies and joint
ventures in more than 30 countries over five continents.
It has rolled out BlackBerry handsets to enable managers to
handle mail, diaries and contacts, and more than 200 GPRS cards to
enable remote, flexible working for managers and sales
people.
A project is under way to provide a mobile work scheduling
system to about 70 OCS service engineers in the technical division,
and a PDA-based quality management system has been developed for
use in OCS’ airport services.
Another major mobile project is being planned for work
scheduling in the company's hygiene division.
Meeting the mobile challenge
IT mobility is growing fast,asserts Jenny Sener. "There are 1.5
billion mobile phones worldwide, $3.5bn (£1.9bn ) worth of PDAs
will ship by the end of 2004, and shipments of laptops are forecast
to rise by 13% in 2005, over half with Centrino chips with inbuilt
WiFi," she said.
"Gartner reports businesses as just being at the start of the
growth curve in deploying mobile IT. It predicts that the average
business will be doing 80% more mobile applications over the next
year than in the previous year," she says.
However, although such statistics show that the mobility growth
curve is up, itis still early days.
"The Economist Intelligence Unit reports that, of 300 global
companies surveyed recently, only l8% had rolled out big mobile
projects," says Sener. "So although there is a lot of talk, hype
and pilot schemes, we are still at the start of the growth
curve”.
Compelling reasons
But the need to get serious about mobility is incontestable,
believes Sener.
"The reasons are compelling," she argues. "Mobility has a huge
impact on decreasing costs and increasing productivity and
flexibility." This combination delivers increased competitiveness,
she says.
Mobility can cut time, paperwork, overheads, staff and rent on
premises, and has a huge potential to improve service delivery,
speed, flexibility and customer satisfaction, according to Sener.
It also has significant implications for cash flow, where a digital
signature from a customer can initiate an immediate invoice.
“The vision is ‘coalface to core’ in one digital hop,” she says,
adding, “It is better to incorporate mobile technology within an
information strategy than to let it creep in through the back
door.”
According to Forrester Research, says Sener, the benefits of
mobility projects delivered to other companies include improved
productivity (60%), real time information (40%), improved customer
satisfaction (36%) and improved logistics (20%).
But there are two major challenges to overcome - technical and
workforce. "Don't underestimate either," warns Sener. The mobile
environment is complex, she points out, both in terms of technology
and its impact on business and staff.
Technology
"There are various baskets of mobile technology," she says. "In
the first we see ‘always on’ packet technologies like GPRS and
3G.
"Within OCS both GPRS cards in laptops and ADSL lines have had a
major impact on creating greater workforce flexibility, enabling
roaming working and home working. This, in turn, has an impact on
the responsiveness and economics of the business.
"In the second basket of technologies we have 802.11b, 802.11g
and other flavours, and WiMax. London is already number three
worldwide for wireless hotspots, after Seoul and New York - I was
surprised to find so many hotspots in Crawley, where OCS is based,"
says Sener.
"The impact of WiFi will be interesting. Telcos have invested so
much in 3G that they have to claw back their investment. Currently
3G pricing tariffs are high and it will be interesting to see if
the development of WiFi will prove a 3G killer or not.
“Then there is the growing plethora of other wireless
technologies, such as ZigBee - tiny wireless devices which will
increasingly be placed in industrial and domestic sensors, and
which can extend WiFi meshing.
"Bluetooth will give access to near-range mobility, such as
printers. GPS brings another important dimension as a worldwide
radio navigation system.
"Finally, on the largest scale of all, is the satellite
broadband network, with the latest round of BGAN satellite launches
next year promising to provide connectivity across the whole earth,
except at the poles."
Impact on users
The other side of the mobility coin is the impact these
technologies will have on those who use them. "There are two types
of users," says Sener. "Knowledge workers and process workers."
Knowledge workers are "the road warriors and the managers, who
are relatively easy to satisfy with mobile solutions - we have
given them GPRS cards and BlackBerry handsets and they are happy as
Larry", she says.
The only problem, she points out, is that such devices can
sometimes be viewed as ‘toys for the boys’, with users anxious to
be seen only with the latest gizmos.
Process workers - mobile staff such as delivery drivers or field
engineers - using PDAs to record deliveries and work carried out,
are a more complex and demanding group when it comes to the
provision of mobile solutions.
"These users can see ‘big brother’ in mobile devices, which are
capable of time- and date-stamping their activities and tracking
their movements. Reactions can be highly negative, and this sort of
reaction can kill a mobile project stone dead," warns Sener.
Conversely, some may expect too much of mobile devices.
Cultivate enthusiasm
Sener's advice, from her own experiences at OCS, is to cultivate
mobile technology evangelists in every group of workers who will be
going mobile.
"If staff are not comfortable using mobile technology we
identify an evangelist, treat them as special, bring them into
meetings, get them involved, so that they can then make mobile
technology something wanted, not resisted, among their colleagues,"
says Sener.
It is essential, she stresses, that mobile users find the
technology valuable for themselves. "You have got to answer the
'What's in it for me?' question," she says, “if you are to deliver
a successful project”.
Making their jobs easier, faster and more hassle-free, with less
paperwork and reducing the need to call into at the office or depot
is an obvious benefit, but there are others less apparent.
GPS, for example, can make workers feel safer, as they know
their position is always known to someone else, and for engineers
who are paid on 'piece-work' they can see just how much they are
earning through the day by getting their PDA to tot this up for
them in real time.
Technology challenges
"If we want 'coalface to core' mobility then the big challenge
is to get end-to-end transaction processing, linking the remote
worker to the heavy-duty back-end system, says Sener.
"We need end-to-end resilience, from the handheld device,
through the GPRS system, the corporate firewall, the server, the
back-end database and then back out again to the remote
worker."
"Scalability is essential when you have hundreds of devices out
in the field - you have to install the pipework to get them into
your back end systems. We're currently putting in dedicated 2GByte
pipes to support GPRS access from mobile devices."
"Security is also a very real issue, involving things like
authentication, software firewalls and VPN tunnelling."
End-to-end remote connectivity also requires other disaster
recovery provisions to enable the workforce to operate if the
mobile solution were to go down.
Hardy hardware
"Battery technology is a disaster!" says Sener. "It just can't
keep pace with the speed of mobile technology development. However,
I have hopes of fuel cell technology coming along, which may well
be in high-end laptops from early next year."
Personal devices are also physically vulnerable - to both theft
and damage. "We looked at ruggedised devices, but there were
serious cost implications," says Sener. "XDA2, for example, is
around one third of the cost of the ruggedised equivalent.
“However, the risks of physical damage can sometimes be
overplayed and there is some tentative evidence that when devices
are given to operatives, they feel they are special, and they look
after them," she says.
Conversely, warns Sener, 'accidental' physical damage can be
seen as a way of obtaining an even fancier device by the ‘boys'
toys’ brigade of users.
Management and support
However, the biggest headache in deploying mobile technology,
says Sener, is in support and management. "When you have hundreds
of devices you need to be able to enable remote configuration and
device-lock or support costs will escalate."
The cost profile of mobile deployment makes the headache clear.
"Ten per cent of the cost of mobility is in the devices - the rest
is in the infrastructure and management costs to deliver the
technology," she says.
"You may think a device is 'only £200' but that is just the tip
of the iceberg: 40% of the costs are in development, redesigning
the business process for mobility, networking and security, but 50%
is in management and support. That's the killer."
Choosing a device
The choice of device can seriously affect these costs. "We have
handed out more than 200 GPRS cards to road warriors and set up
over 200 ADSL lines so that they can link in from home via VPN to
our secure network," says Sener.
"We trialled iPAQs first of all, over l8 months ago, but it was
a major deployment problem because of all the changes Compaq kept
bringing out. All the new versions and changes to GPRS
configuration just absorbed far too much IT resource for deploying
these devices in significant numbers."
Instead, OCS has now started to use XDA2 devices. "They are much
easier to configure and control for large deployment," she
says.
"We're using Nexus software from ThreeX - a GE company - as
middleware so that we have a single application layer for doing
remote configuration and lock-down for the diverse solutions we
offer our business divisions. The choice of enabling middleware is
key."
“It is important to ensure each solution is fit for purpose,
remembering that simple = low-cost. Use a thin client browser
approach to provide manageability, security and lower data costs,
as small volumes of data are replicated between client and
server.”
"We are also exploring using digital pens from the Swedish
company Anoto. We are pilot testing digital forms for input into
our SAP payroll system. These are printed on a special digital grid
paper, onto which the digital pen writes. The data is then captured
by OCR. We are working with SAP to develop an interface to feed
this data into our SAP payroll system. This would enable us to
reduce the cost and time of payroll administration
significantly.”
Sener is looking at radio technology for inanimate objects as
well as people. "We use barcodes, for example in our laundry
business. However, we are looking at RFID but need it to become
much cheaper to be viable.
"With companies like Wal-Mart and Tesco starting to mandate RFID
for their suppliers we'll see the cost coming down markedly, I'm
sure. Implanted ZigBee microdevices are also something to watch,
and may challenge RFID in some applications."
One step at a time
OCS' approach to mobile rollout is on a project by project basis
- deliberately so, says Sener. "In terms of cost justification,"
she says, "we are taking it business process by business process,
rather than blanket applications.
"Each mobilised process has to be evaluated on its own merits.
So, for example, our boiler maintenance engineers are now getting
XDA2s for job scheduling. We are piloting a PDA-based quality
management solution for our airport workers.”
However, because mobile technologies are evolving so fast, the
business case for mobilising any process has to take into account
the inevitability that the device could well become out-of-date
before the benefits have been fully delivered, and even before the
telco contract expires.
"The potential benefits of mobile working are so great that
business will not care about the hassle and cost to IT if it is
necessary to change and update devices," warns Sener.
Why wait?
Despite the challenges there is no question, believes Sener, but
that mobile IT is going to make a huge impact on business. Nor is
there any reason to delay.
"The technology is proven, the costs are coming down, the telco
suppliers are offering more manageable bundled data costs, and
remote configuration and security are coming under control," she
says.
"Mobility will be ubiquitous, just like the internet, so it is
far better for us to drive a mobile strategy, rather than be
dragged along into the mobile era."
Challenges of mobility
- Technology is highly diverse, fast-evolving, competing and
confusing
- Business processes will have to be redesigned for mobile
workers
- Devices have short shelf-lives
- Battery technology lags far behind the pace of device
development
- Choice of middleware to give a uniform wrap to applications is
important
- The greatest percentage of mobile project costs is in the
management and support for mobile applications (this can be
improved by remote device configuration and lockdown)
- Telcos are over-focused on mobile voice, rather than data
comms
- Mobile workers may resist devices that time- and date-stamp
their activities
- Handheld devices are vulnerable in terms of being broken,
stolen or lost
- 'Road warrior' users may endlessly crave the latest gizmos
- The coalface-to-core remote-to-backend link must be seamless,
resilient and secure
- Mobility must be scalable to be successful, and the multiplier
effect means that secure corporate bandwidth must increase
dramatically
- Back-end systems may need to be redesigned or adapted to mobile
input and real-time response
- The success of mobility uptake will mean business makes ever
increasing demands on IT for more mobility.