Businesses are deployingmobile working technologies, but are
failing to measure the impact they have on the productivity of
mobile workers, said analyst firm Gartner.
The result is that IT projects aimed at improving the efficiency
of mobile workers are failing to deliver business benefits, said
analyst Scott Morrsion.
"Ninety per cent of businesses now have remote workers but
twenty five per cent have not defined service levels to support
these workers," he said.
Morrison said that IT managers must ensure that mobile workers
have access to the right type of connectivity, irrespective of
their location, to deliver business benefits,
Organisations should conduct a segmentation analysis of the
likely locations a mobile worker could work from - for example, a
home office, a branch office or at a client site - and then
determine how the worker could connect under each of these
scenarios.
"Do not assume your mobile workers will always be connecting
through one type of network connection from one type of site and
device. Mobile workers need a flexible IT infrastructure to be
truly effective. Draft your mobile IT project plans with users in
different scenarios to deliver a consistent mobile experience."
Morrsion said that IT support desks also needed to be rearranged
around the mobile worker, who can operate in different time zones,
and should not just be geared to delivering support to the desk
users.
Businesses with a dependency on mobile workers, those with
salesmen in field for example, should audit the productivity of
mobile workers to check that their mobile IT strategy is delivering
business benefits.
Frank Bieser, director of IT at Herold Business Data, the
Austrian Yellow Pages, manages a team of software developers who
work remotely and audits their performance.
He measured a reduction in programming errors and an increase in
the number of tasks completed to prove to the business that mobile
working delivered over fixed-desk working.
"There can be mistrust when you do not see an employee in the
office. We started with a small team of programmers who began
working remotely and then used the measurements to roll out mobile
working across the company. It was a big part of selling remote
working."