Information Age: News, analysis & insight for IT & business leaders

It has been a piecemeal - but unstoppable - revolution. Over the past decade, the mobile technologies that are progressively creating the 'agile workforce' have become part of the fabric of modern business.

They have changed the working practices of field sales reps and service engineers, taken information to management and key workers on the move, enabled off-site and home working, allowed staff to be briefed via online downloads and video conferencing, and provided collaboration, application, email and data access facilities to the dispersed workforce.

The business benefits are certainly evident with some groups of workers, but the disjointed and overlapping nature of many mobile technologies and support overheads has brought a new focus on their associated costs, as well as on who should take responsibility for coordinating mobile strategy.

Managing the devices - PDAs, advanced mobile phones, pagers, laptops, home-worker PCs - their supporting networks, and the applications that underpin their operation - represent an ever-larger challenge to the IT organisation.

A typical field sales rep at a medium or large organisation, for example, may use a PDA for scheduling meetings, recording sales, and even emailing, but will also expect to use a laptop with a dial-up modem for hooking into the corporate sales and marketing system, and a mobile phone for receiving immediate information updates from head office.

The cost of that individual's infrastructure may be high but there is some way to go before the use of these discrete, yet vital tools can be coordinated. Indeed, according to Isaac Ro, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, the IT department should, at this point, not be aiming to build a single, cross-enterprise mobile strategy, because the technology to enable this does not yet exist.

"Organisations are not in a position to be thinking about a long-term [mobile office] strategy. For now, it has got to be a short term fix," says Ro. Furthermore, he says, any mobile technology implementation should be able to show a return on investment within six months.

There are plenty of cases where, on the surface, that payback looks obvious: The provision of mobile systems to field service engineers so they need not phone in for technical information, the enabling of home working and the subsequent reduction in office infrastructure costs, the networking of dispersed teams so they can hold online meetings, work on shared documents and coordinate their activities.

But there are few studies that take into account the full scope and investment required to build and operate the mobile workforce infrastructure.

Payback time

The first step to controlling the costs and measuring the benefits of mobile deployment is to focus on providing functions that will benefit specific groups of employees.

"The mobile industry's marketing tag line: 'Any application, on any device, anywhere' has done the market a big disservice," says Ro. "For example, it is a completely ludicrous idea to give every employee access to wireless email. Of course, many people could benefit from it, but at what cost?"

The point that such analyst makes is that the IT department should only provide mobile technologies where it is appropriate, and where the business benefits are demonstrable.

"Organisations that proactively link mobile technology investments to job functions and bottom-line productivity indicators, such as sales revenue, customer support, and internal operational goals, will be successful at defining mobile ROI [return on investment], " explains Nick Jones, an analyst at Gartner Research.

That was certainly the case at Siemens Communications. Between April and October 2002, the telecommunications equipment supplier rolled out wireless connectivity for 250 field engineers in the UK. The focus, at least in the initial phase, was simple: to eliminate the two primary reasons the engineers made repeated calls to the company's technical helpdesk throughout their workday: one was to access their daily appointments schedule, and the second was to order spare parts.

The engineers now access the SAP business applications that coordinate their schedules and part ordering from PDAs over a GPRS network run by BT's O2 mobile division. Although the applications are limited, the cost benefits are clear: through an 80% reduction in phone calls to the call centre, the helpdesk headcount has been reduced by 15%, says Ian Robinson, customer services director at Siemens Communications. At the same time, engineers' mobile network charges have been cut by £200 per engineer per year, and the quality of the service delivered has improved as information is communicated more accurately.

The upshot, believes Robinson, is that an ROI will be reached within nine months of the technology being deployed.

That has paved the way for more sophisticated usage. In a second phase, engineers will have deeper access to Siemens' back-end SAP applications, giving them the ability to view technical specifications and manuals from their PDAs.

Cost structure

That kind of application highlights the three main technology - and cost - areas that organisations need to consider when building a mobile office strategy, according to Nick Jones, an analyst with market research company Gartner.

First, there are network services. The agile worker needs to be able to access applications wherever they are, at whatever time. The main cost structures here centre on the volume-based or flat-rate charging schemes of mobile network operators.

Volume-based pricing models are by far the most common, and levy charges on users based on the amount of data they download. The benefits of this model, says Giga analyst Brownlee Thomas, is that they give IT administrators the ability to purchase large amounts data capacity upfront, and manage users' access to this themselves.

According to Carl Boraman, sales and marketing director for Axxent Voice and Data Communications, a typical business package in the UK costs around £15 per month for a 5MB data-only subscription, or £3.50 per MB per month for a voice and data package.

However, the main disadvantage of volume-based pricing is that it makes scaling up the number of users expensive. "As a result, companies need to develop or acquire tools that will enable them to track actual usage data across the organization on an ongoing basis," says Thomas.

Secondly, IT executives need to consider the capital and support costs inherent in the different devices used by employees. The general rule is that the greater the number of device types and the more capable the device, the higher the cost for buying and supporting it, says Gartner's Jones. For example, the support costs for a PDA are 55% of the overall cost, compared to an enhanced mobile phone's 40%. That is because an enhanced phone, such as a wireless application protocol (WAP) device, is a 'thin-client' that cannot execute business applications locally, relying on the network for information delivery, says Jones,

Finally, IT management must consider the application infrastructure that will support mobile users now and in the future. Several factors affect cost here. Increasingly, the IT department needs to operate web-enabled applications so that corporate data can be accessed through PC- or laptop-based web browsers. Aside from the underlying business applications, this requires investment in security technologies for identity management and data encryption. Applications may also need to be accessed through mobile phones or PDAs, which again requires investment in 'gateways' that enable these devices to access data in a format suitable for these devices' smaller screen.

Close alignment

The complexity of establishing such a mobile facility prompts many organisations to outsource the provision of a 'mobile office' to a third-party specialist.

For example, BT's business services and solutions business, BT Ignite, partners with Microsoft to deliver a package that includes the provision of wireless bandwidth, desktop and device maintenance, as well as security and authentication. Over a three-year contract, for at least 500 users, this type of option would cost around £1,800 per user per year, according to Mike Needs, BT Ignite's deputy general manager of ebusiness.

Many small businesses or departments will, however, make do with wireless email and calendaring facilities, which can be put in place for around £900 per user per year, says Boraman from Axxent.

But, whatever the level of sophistication, IT decision-makers needs to ensure the infrastructure choices deliver business benefit.

"Going mobile calls for new ideas and skill sets that must, at all times, be aligned with overall business and IT strategies," concludes Giga analyst Bernt Ostergaard. "It is more important than ever before that formalised corporate policies are in place with well-defined interaction between management, the IT department and the lines of business."