The Role of the Smartphone in Enterprise Mobility

BSA Interview

Business Strategy Australasia recently asked Managing Director Malcolm Lithgow a few questions about the importance and challenges of mobility in todays working environment.

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When most people think of mobility, they think of remote access to email. Is this how you view mobility?

No. When I think of mobility, I have the image of a professional equipped with a smartphone that can access any and all important information in real time. They can move from place to place conducting business and closing deals, even while attending to private matters.

Mobility is about accessing all types of information, including changes to shared calendars, contacts databases, or databases of geographically local events and activities. It’s about having that information at hand when you need it, while you are out and about, active and mobile. It’s also about sharing changes that you make to your own information while on the go, such as changes to your schedule, or contacts information that you have captured.

Mobility is about enabling you to stay completely connected to your co-workers, your friends and family, and to the Internet while you are on the move. Email is only a small part of it.

What is driving mobility uptake at the moment?

I think what’s driving the uptake of mobility is that people are suddenly free to perform their jobs even while they are mobile. For example, in the service industry, you can now visit a client and relate directly to their context while still having access to all of your information and to your co-workers. That’s a very powerful incentive to exploit mobility. In the construction industry, you can now be working on site and still have full access to all of the information about your projects and schedule.

Even where mobility is traditionally not considered to be an asset, such as in industries that perform back office types of activities, introducing mobility still allows staff to better balance their work and their life. For example, you can get some work done while dropping your kids off at school, or from home, or while waiting for a haircut or doctor’s appointment.

Mobility is really driven by the desire to be connected to your work while you are out of the office. Why is that worth pursuing? Because it either improves your delivery of services or it gives you a better work-life balance.

What specific challenges does mobility present to larger organisations?

Mobility presents two challenges to any organization, but particularly to large organizations. The first is ‘control’ and the second is ‘work-life balance’.

Traditionally, large organizations managed their workers by controlling their location. If their workers were in their cubicle or office, they were working. If they were not in their office, they weren’t working. However, the Internet has already changed that. Now, you can’t tell whether your people are working even when they are in their office. They could be browsing the web to look up movie times, buy tickets online or book a holiday. Companies have developed technologies that attempt to solve that problem, but it is still an issue.

Mobility takes that issue of control further because people can now do their job anywhere, and should be doing their job wherever is best for them and their clients or customers. But that raises the issue as to how organizations can control staff remotely. Frankly, they can’t. But they can monitor their staff. So increased mobility will require companies to learn how to combine performance monitoring with training and tools for self-management.

That leads to the second issue: work-life balance. With people able to do their job wherever they are and whenever they have the opportunity, it’s very easy for them to lose an appropriate work-life balance. They blur the boundary between work and life and lose track of how much or how little work they do.

This is a problem that really needs to be addressed by both companies and employees. Organizations don’t want their people to be over-worked and therefore burnt out and unenthusiastic. But neither do they want them taking advantage of the company. Rather, both sides desire a work-life balance that benefits the employer and employee. The technology enabling mobility must be used to improve the work-life balance and not to destroy it.

Mobility, therefore, redefines the traditional issue of control into one of monitoring and optimally managing each individual worker’s work-life balance.

Wireless gives workers access to time-sensitive information. Why is speed so important?

Speed and time-sensitivity are important in our modern economic environment because of the level of communications that exist between everyone and everything. Relationships between producers and consumers nowadays are very complex.

Relationships in the past used to be very simple. We handed our accounts to our accountant at the end of the financial year to do the tax, or we delivered X number of widgets to the factory at such and such a time. But now, we expect an accountant to relate to our business and to discuss issues with us throughout the year. And in manufacturing, we have just-in-time manufacturing where the components supplier gets an order for a component to be delivered just in time to be put in the product on the assembly line.
So the services model has become a relationship model. The manufacturing supply chain has become a sophisticated on-demand just-in-time supply chain. All businesses, including governments, are becoming increasingly inter-related.

When you have this complex inter-related set of communications, you need very speedy responses. Otherwise, the system breaks down. As people are becoming more mobile, they still need to be able to respond quickly in these relationships, even when they are out on the road. The rapidity and ubiquity of communications is crucial in maintaining this modern economic model.  

        

As well as speed of communications, the volume of information flowing into government agencies is increasing dramatically year-on year. Will wireless be able to keep up?

I think wireless will have no problem keeping up with the amount of information flowing into the government, even as it increases.

After all, governments generate and collect far less information than enterprises and individuals do. Individuals and enterprises generate a huge flow of information. Just go onto the Internet and look at the vast flow of information from private individuals in the form of photographs, audio files, movies, blogs, etc. Then look at the enormous array of information from enterprises. Now compare that to the relatively small amount of information that governments collect and provide.

Government information collection is more structured than private and enterprise practices. The process is more obvious to us because of that formality. But in terms of the volume and the processes required, government requirements are a tiny fraction of that which are already demanded by private and enterprise interests. So if the wireless infrastructure can already support the private and enterprise sectors, there are unlikely to be any issues with the government sector.

The real question is whether government agencies can keep up with the flow of information that they want, and whether they can create the infrastructure to properly manage this flow of information. Ironically, they are increasingly turning to off-the-shelf enterprise solutions to solve this.