As more workers require mobile access to corporate systems from
home or on the road, support costs can spiral. Jessica Twentyman
maps out ways to understand these costs, minimise them, and justify
the expense to the board
The mobile workforce poses a tricky conundrum for the IT manager:
the productivity paybacks to be gained by enabling employees to
access corporate data regardless of location are alluring, but the
support costs involved are hard to calculate.
That makes building a solid business case for mobile deployments a
hit-or-miss affair. Will PDAs last 12 months or three years? Will
the company be forced to invest in more bandwidth six months after
the initial implementation, or should it over-order now on
capacity? Will the mobile applications that it is planning to roll
out be the ones that prove most popular with employees?
Not only that, but the disjointed and overlapping nature of many
mobile technologies and support overheads introduce a further level
of complexity to the equation. A sales representative who spends
much of their time on the road, for example, may use a PDA for
scheduling appointments and accessing e-mail, a laptop for storing
sales presentations and entering new orders into the company's
sales systems, and a mobile phone for staying in contact with head
office.
Managing those devices for an entire salesforce clearly poses a
huge support burden for IT teams - and, potentially, huge
associated costs.
"We often find that IT teams are expected to support mobile users
with little thought paid to the added costs of doing so," says Dean
Murphy, head of wireless technologies at Satsuma Solutions, which
provides consultancy services in web, Windows and wireless
technologies for companies including drinks giant Diageo and
printer firm Epson. "What we propose is that companies need to find
strategies for funding IT departments out of the productivity gains
that are achieved by implementing mobile applications."
According to a report from Forrester Research, the cost of
supporting a mobile user ranges from 1.5 to three times that for a
traditional, "tethered" user. "These higher support costs are the
result of several factors, including irregular connections to the
network, low-bandwidth connections and more complex applications
and hardware," says Forrester analyst David Friedlander (see box,
Breaking down the costs).
The costs involved in supporting mobile workers fall into three
discrete categories: network services, device hardware, and
application/network infrastructure.
Network services tend to top the list of concerns over mobile
enablement, primarily because of cost but also speed of transfer
and accessibility. At present, most organisations opt for GPRS
voice/data connectivity, either using volume-based or flat-rate
tariffs. Third generation networks are expected to be available in
most major UK cities by the end of 2005, but coverage will be
patchy elsewhere for some time, forcing companies to rely on a
hybrid 3G/GPRS strategy for international connectivity.
In either case, beyond hard-ball tariff negotiation with the mobile
operators, there is little organisations can do to cut costs in
this area, reliant as they are on the ability of their employees to
access and send data regardless of location and timezones. It is,
however, a good idea to track costs on a per-user basis.
When it comes to devices, the general rule is that the greater the
number of device types supported (and the more capabilities offered
by those devices), the higher the costs will be for purchasing and
supporting them.
"Organisations should standardise mobile device platforms to the
greatest extent possible," says Friedlander. "Although it is rarely
possible to deploy a single mobile platform, companies should
attempt to limit support to three PDA or converged device
platforms."
Most experts agree that allowing employees to bring in their own
mobile devices from home and expect IT support for them is
unworkable. "You might just as well allow them to build their own
PCs and install their own choice of desktop software," says Bob
Brace, vice-president of mobile solutions at Nokia.
Worse still, it can introduce serious security weaknesses, says
Maria Lorenz, end-user services consultant at IT consultancy
Fujitsu Services. "I often say that one of the biggest threats to
IT security is Christmas, when everyone receives shiny new devices
that they want to use to access corporate data," she says.
Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, for example, has recently cut
its mobile costs significantly by rationalising both the number and
type of devices it issues to senior managers so they can access
their e-mails on the move.
"A lot of our senior managers are away from their desks for a great
deal of time during the day either at one of our 10 outreach sites
or in offsite meetings," says Steven Gill, IT infrastructure
support engineer at Moorfields Eye Hospital.
After using Blackberry devices for some time, the hospital decided
that it could get a better deal by switching to XDAs. The
per-device price of the XDAs was £250, with per-month subscription
costs of £22 through O2, as compared to a price of £350 per
Blackberry device and charges of £34 per month. In addition,
because the XDAs offer more functions than Blackberries, the
hospital now plans to replace a number of its laptops with XDAs.
"This will save the purchase price of laptops, difficult and
lengthy support for them, and dial-up costs," says Gill.
Finally, IT management must consider the application infrastructure
that will support mobile users. The IT department will need to
purchase, implement and provide ongoing support for web-enabled
applications that allow corporate data to be accessed through a
variety of client devices as well as data synchronisation tools
that take into account the intermittent connectivity of mobile
devices.
It will also need to take into account the cost of security
technologies for identity management and data encryption. And where
applications will be accessed through mobile phones or PDAs, the IT
department will need to install software "gateways" that enable
these devices to access data in a format suitable for their small
displays.
IT departments will need to reassess these costs regularly if they
are to stay abreast of changing technologies and take advantage of
the cost savings that they offer, says Friedlander. That may be
time-consuming but offers an attractive payback, "Companies with
strong, up-to-date mobile usage policies and robust management
tools will be able to reduce mobile support costs by 20% to 30%,"
he says.
Case study: Property firm keeps down cost of mobile
e-mail
When London-based property consultancy Spring4 was considering
ways of providing its agents with mobile access to e-mail, cost was
a primary concern. "We were looking for an accessible system - but
one that did not require a huge financial investment," says
Spring4's operations director Richard Peperell.
Initially, the company considered equipping employees with
Blackberry devices, but that option was swiftly ruled out when the
potential costs involved in that became apparent. "We calculated
that a Blackberry approach might cost us as much as £35 per month,
and that would be an excessive burden to us," says Peperell.
Instead, Spring4 opted for a mobile service from OpenHand, which
meant an initial software purchase price but no ongoing monthly
charge except for the mobile operator's call charges. These, says
Peperell, rarely exceed £5 per user.
At that price, he adds, there is no reason to exclude any
employee from mobile e-mail access. Employees equipped with a Sony
Ericsson P900 smartphone can not only pick up their e-mail but
search the 4,000 business contacts held on Spring4's sales force
automation system ACT. They can also use the smartphone's camera to
take photos of properties and send them to colleagues and potential
buyers.
That has meant that Spring4 has saved money by negating the need
to invest in extra laptops and digital cameras. It has also found
that using e-mail rather than making phone calls has cut costs.
Another benefit is that employees are more productive as they can
send e-mails when travelling.
Because OpenHand is not tied to a specific network or appliance,
Spring 4 was able to stay with its existing mobile carrier 02 and
negotiate a separate rate for data transfer. And because OpenHand
supports the most widely available wireless network protocols,
including GSM and GPRS, Spring4 staff can stay in touch wherever
they are in the world. "We have members of staff who travel
extensively. We didn't want to be limited by the number of
territories that would support our choice of mobile e-mail," says
Peperell.
To prevent unauthorised access, the OpenHand server sits inside
Spring4's firewall and uses the 128bit Advanced Encryption
Standard, which scrambles information being transmitted from the
server to the phone. Because data is held on the OpenHand server
rather than the phone, it is not lost if the device is lost or
stolen.
Breaking down the costs
"As companies expand the mobile workforce and evaluate wireless
e-mail or business applications deployed to handheld devices,
understanding support costs will be critical to making a business
case," says Forrester's David Friedlander.
Forrester's methodology for doing this uses existing cost models
for regular, "tethered" users as a baseline. Mobile users are then
broken down into four categories:
- Casual worker. An employee who works from home infrequently and
uses a PC to access data
- Permanent teleworker. Employees based in a home office that
undertake little or no travel
- Task-oriented mobile worker. An employee whose job is mobile
but who has a specific task that requires limited access to IT
resources
- Mobile employee. Travels at least 25% of the time and may use
various devices.
From here, firms can calculate how much more mobile users cost
to support than tethered users.
In the example below, Company X has 5,000 staff, of which 3,500
are tethered users. The 1,500 mobile users are broken down into the
four categories, each with cost multiple associated with it
relative to a tethered user. Friedlander says multiples will vary
by 30% to 50% based on users' mobility and the complexity of the IT
environment.