Compliance and legislation puts an ever-increasing burden of
accountability on organisations, whether it is for the benefit of
financial regulations, health and safety or, more frequently today,
for evaluating customer service,writes David Perry,
director atCognito.
IT has played a significant role in helping companies meet their
accountability obligations by making the process of recording,
storing and then accessing critical information highly efficient.
However, with the proliferation of mobile devices, new sources of
data are becoming available to the business, recording more detail
of the day-to-day operations of field workers.
As these devices and supporting mobile applications exist
outside the corporate firewall, and are often operated by
non-technical personnel they are much harder to control.
For mobile applications to work properly, they are dependent on
the reliability of mobile networks, which are still not as reliable
as their proven fixed-line counterparts. Mobile workers must cope
with the often patchy network coverage of a mobile operator. This
means it is important to build in mechanisms to manage workers'
actions and safety when they are offline.
Giving mobile workers the equivalent level of technical support
to office workers also isn't always feasible as problems that
require remote management cannot be reliably addressed over the
air. In the worst case, problems can only really be dealt with if
the worker returns to base, disrupting the working day and playing
havoc with a worker's productivity.
In addition to connectivity, another problem with mobility is
basic usability. Businesses often bring in mobile solutions to
replace paper-based systems such as forms, which are frequently
subject to human error such as a missed entry or illegible
handwriting. However, these businesses then find workers will
struggle to use the small screen and often awkward user interface
of mobile devices, which in turn offsets any of the intended
benefits of disposing of a paper-based system.
The overarching challenge is that delivering improved business
performance through mobile IT requires the specialist knowledge of
integrating mobile devices and applications with back office IT
systems. However, in a recent Cognito survey, 44% of IT departments
said they lacked such expertise. This inexperience is not
surprising given the fact that mobile integrated applications that
go beyond push email, calendar and contacts or even access to a
single application are still in their infancy.
Knowing all this makes little difference to the irate customer
who has been waiting all day for a package with no reasonable
explanation as to why. Hence in order to achieve true mobility, IT
departments should consider looking outside their four walls for
help. For example, instead of building or managing a mobile
application and the hardware it resides on, it might be more viable
to work with a managed provider that can remove the burden of this
activity
Instead of attempting to make a back-office application such as
an ordering system fit on a mobile device as-is, there's also
greater value in designing the application to take advantage of
features such as a touch screen, GPS, camera or barcode reader.
These should all be adapted to the existing business processes or
'workflow' of field staff.
Since performing such an integration and customisation, private
car hire firm Addison Lee can now allocate 98% of its jobs
automatically, removing the risk of human error, and has reduced
complaints and pick-up errors to less than 1% of all jobs, all of
which is fully auditable in the case of customer query or
complaint. Similarly, it is this scale of 'auditability' that has
led courier company DX Group to implement a system designed with
the express purpose of improving customer satisfaction.
Implementing mobility to improve business performance and
accountability is all well and good. However, if you don't fully
understand both the capabilities and limitations of the technology,
dotting the Is, crossing the Ts and ticking the boxes becomes a
painful task.