Towards the end of 2003, Carsten Sorenson, senior lecturer in IS
at the London School of Economics, issued a call to action to any
company embarking on a mobile working strategy. The barrier to the
complete uptake of mobile technologies, he said, was not restricted
to the technology itself, but also to the social aspects of
flexible working.
Sorenson’s research, commissioned by
mobile phone operator Orange, made it clear that the forces shaping
the mobile revolution go deeper than technology itself. “Deep
social and organisation issues such as trust, routines and culture
need to be addressed and are equally important, if we are to see
mobile technology truly take off,” he wrote.
More than a year on, however, there is plenty of evidence that, in
the race to acquire new end-user devices, synchronise them with the
corporate IT infrastructure and put them in the hands of remote
workers, organisations continue to underestimate how mobile working
will affect the lives and working practices of their
employees.
“Too many companies focus on what
mobile technology can do for the company without really examining
what it can do for their employees,” says Arun Shenoy, director of
small and medium businesses and public sector at chip maker Intel.
To get the full benefits of mobile working, firms need to take a
more holistic and considered approach.
That is certainly the direction taken by Intel, says Shenoy. The
company’s 80,000 employees use about 100,000 mobile devices and it
has a clear strategy for providing them with support and training.
Many remote workers, for example, receive an allowance as part of
their salary to pay for the insurance costs, utilities and office
furniture and equipment they require to work from home. Home
offices, meanwhile, undergo a health and safety assessment to
ensure that the furniture and equipment used meet ergonomic
standards. And every Intel employee is trained in data
confidentiality to ensure they understand their
responsibilities.
But few other organisations are so clear about their mobile working
strategy.
According to Jamie Allender, mobile business manager at IT supplier
Computacenter, companies need to realise that it is happening
anyway, even where they do not have a strategy.
“We see a lot of disjointed, on-the-fly projects, where employees
are already using a wide range of devices and synchronising these
with their desktops,” he says. “At best that creates an IT
management burden, and at worst, it can seriously compromise the
security of corporate data.”
Organisations must set a clear mobile working strategy, says
Brownlee Thomas, an analyst at Forrester Research, and do so
quickly if they are to keep abreast of changes in the underlying
technology. “Large-scale telecommuting programmes that require IT
to provide support to hundreds or thousands of remote workers
create big challenges that are not likely to get easier with the
proliferation of new telecom technologies and increasing network
security threats,” she says.
Thomas has investigated the best practices that ensure a successful
mobile working
strategy. These include: standardisation of supported technologies;
a formal, written telecommuting policy; adequate remote worker
training; and a clear and comprehensive remote support strategy
that defines the different levels of IT support that will be
provided to different kinds of mobile workers.
Standardisation is vital if companies are to get the benefits
promised by mobile working, says Dave Marshall, head of product
management at mobile services supplier Orange Business Solutions.
“There is no way you are going to be able to get costs and support
issues under control unless you decide early on which devices are
the best for your employees and how they are going to use them,” he
says. “Once you start mixing and matching a large range of
different clients, you start introducing all sorts of unnecessary
burdens.”
His advice? “Understand the sorts of tasks that your employees
perform remotely, equip them with a small range of devices that can
support those tasks and do not deviate from that range just to suit
the whims of individual users.”
Orange Business Solutions holds “device clinics” at prospective
client sites, where users can handle and experiment with different
mobile devices. “Those users are not drawn from the IT department,
either,” says Marshall. “They are the end-users who will actually
be carrying the devices and know how they need to use them.”
According to Marshall, by involving end-users in the
standardisation decision companies are more likely to achieve
end-user buy-in when the devices are up and running, and higher
rates of end-user satisfaction.
A formal, written mobile working policy can ensure that employees
use the devices in the intended way. “It should provide guidelines
for teleworkers and telecommuters about IT’s role in enabling and
supporting telecommuting as well as the telecommuter’s own
responsibilities to protect the enterprise network and data,” says
Thomas.
This kind of policy should provide end-users with clear advice in
two areas, says John Lilliestone, senior marketing manager at
Vodafone. “First, mobile workers need to know how and under what
circumstances they are intended to use the device, and what
constitutes acceptable use. Second, they need to know what to do if
the service is interrupted. That is especially important in
situations where the device is lost or stolen.”
Andy White, programme director at IT services supplier Atos Origin,
agrees. “It is a big concern that devices are getting smarter and
holding more potentially sensitive commercial data. Once those
devices are mobile, there is a far greater risk of theft or loss.
That is why it is essential to communicate in a formal way that it
is not the device itself that has premium value to the company, but
the data it holds, and that procedures are in place for reporting
theft and loss of that device.”
The mobile working policy, says Thomas, should be reviewed
periodically by IT, human resources and line-of-business managers,
and should be posted on the corporate intranet as well as being
circulated to mobile workers. The challenge for the IT department
is to ensure it can respond to the growing demand for better IT
support for a range of employees: mobile workers who spend most of
their time on the road and in the field; home-based remote workers
(teleworkers); regular telecommuters (those who work from home more
than once a month); occasional telecommuters and day-extenders
(employees who access e-mail and files using a home PC or a laptop
in the evenings or at weekends).
These profiles are changing and expanding rapidly, says Thomas.
“Five years ago, regular telecommuting was mostly done by
day-
extenders, mobile sales forces, and professional consultants. Now,
telecommuting and remote work are mainstream practices for more
workers and a variety of job functions. Indeed, they are recognised
by a growing number of firms – particularly high-tech, insurance,
pharmaceutical and transportation companies – as critical to
lowering operational costs and ensuring competitiveness.”
But employees in each category require a different level of support
from IT. Mobile workers need remote IT support often. They
regularly work in a variety of environments, often including a home
office. “These workers often rely on more expensive,
lower-performance access technologies to which heavy surcharges
often apply,” says Thomas. “It also tends to be the most expensive
category of workers for IT to support remotely on an ongoing basis,
mainly because constantly changing connectivity means they are
likely to call the helpdesk frequently.”
Permanent home workers, by contrast, require a lot of “getting
started” remote IT support. Regular telecommuters, who work at
least once a month from home, expect their off-site work
environment to perform essentially the same as it does on-site, and
will call the IT helpdesk the moment they experience a remote
connection problem, cannot access data immediately or experience
slower than usual application performance.
Day-extenders and occasional and emergency telecommuters expect
only “best effort” support from IT. “When day-extenders need remote
IT support, it is usually outside of office hours, so they will
probably be out of luck, unless IT’s strategy for remote support
includes on-call staffing cover during extended hours or weekends,”
says Thomas.
Fortunately, this group of users is generally tolerant, she adds.
“After trying a few workaround solutions they are familiar with
already, they will usually give up trying and will call IT when
they are back in the office to evaluate the problem.”
