The evidence across the board is irrefutable: work is no longer a fixed activity. Laptop sales have now eclipsed those of desktops, a million BlackBerrys are sold every month and recent estimates suggest that a third of businesses now have people working away from the office for more than 20% of their time.

But not everyone is offered the capabilities and devices that would enable them to join that group. The IT managers that are delivering the virtual private networks, the remote backup and the array of other services that support out-of-office working are focusing more than ever on ensuring that such facilities are only made available when they can make a positive impact on the bottom line.

And that is underscored by Information Age’s Effective IT survey results. Of the 86% of respondents who said that their organisation had adopted remote or mobile working, 80% regard it as effective, with 39% declaring it ‘very effective’.

John Radcliffe Hospital is a good example of effectiveness. It installed a campus-wide secure wireless network and equipped staff with handheld devices that now enable them to track blood products from dispensary to patient. This is the kind of enhancement that helps drive improvements in patient care, reducing error rates and ensuring every drop of donated blood is used effectively. It has also helped cut costs, from £34 per transfusion to just £17.

Elsewhere, financial services giant HSBC has embraced the concepts of mobile working to improve employees’ work-life balance as well as helping the company meet its commitment to becoming carbon neutral by cutting back on unnecessary travel. Related to that, HSBC has been piloting virtual call centres, which allow staff to take customer calls remotely.

In fact, email remains one of the few enterprise applications that has successfully made the leap to the mobile world. The limiting factor for others is not connectivity or processing power but form factor. Even something as seemingly simple as web browsing – possible on all manner of mobile handsets – has yet to take off. According to analyst Yankee Group, in the US just 13% of mobile phone users surf the web via their phone.

To date, businesses have circumvented this situation in one of two ways. The first option has been to recode business application interfaces, making them suitable for displaying on much smaller devices. The other has been to provide staff with laptops.

Both have been shown to be hugely effective. For example, micro-electronics manufacturer FSI International recently ditched whole swathes of paper-based processes after it equipped staff with laptops. Through deploying a version of its SAP business software specifically designed for mobile working, FSI was able to integrate data collected by its field service engineers straight back into its core systems. As a result, it has improved visibility into its inventory and improved customer service by enabling its field staff to give more accurate price quotes.

But the ubiquitous laptop and alternatives such as the tablet PC are about to be joined by a whole new wave of device types sporting sleek new interfaces, better suited for running line-of-business applications used by field staff.

Once again, the example of the BlackBerry may provide a clue as to how this will evolve. Widely imitated, it sounded the death knell for the traditional PDA. Today, any PDA of standing has to be able to handle both ‘push’ email and mobile calls.

Similarly, the next generation of mobile devices that will compete with the iPhone are likely to combine the best features from a panoply of devices, such as WiFi connectivity and location-based services.

The impact of these changes can be seen at hardware manufacturer Dell. In the past it had clear product lines for desktops, laptops and PDAs. Today, company CEO Michael Dell talks about producing a whole range of devices with screen sizes of between three inches and 12 inches.

Unification of communication

This proliferation of devices, alongside intense competition among mobile operators, is driving the growth of mobile unified communications, reports competitive response solutions provider Current Analysis. In its 2007 market analysis, it notes that businesses are now investing in ways of integrating mobile users’ voice and data back into the enterprise communication architecture. This is being driven by the early experiences of mobile unified communications, the report says, which has been overwhelmingly positive: 29% of those businesses surveyed by Current Analysis said they had experienced higher customer satisfaction; 27% enjoyed increased levels of employee satisfaction; and 18% saw an uptick in sales.

Despite the enthusiasm for mobile working, some questions remain, particularly over forms of connectivity. For some, mobile broadband has meant 3G services offered by mobile operators – Orange, Vodafone, T-Mobile and other – have provided businesses with high-speed wireless access. The use of 3G laptop cards has enabled organisations such as Nottingham NHS Health Informatics Service to deliver office-like functionality to mobile staff.

But others prefer alternative wireless technologies such as WiFi; indeed many of the latest generation of mobile devices have WiFi capabilities built in. And alongside WiFi, another high-speed mobile technology is starting to gain some traction: WiMax. Analysts at the Yankee Group are predicting a sharp take-up of WiMax in the coming years, predicting that by 2011 there will be 37 million WiMax subscribers.

After many years during which it was little more than a theoretical technology, WiMax is starting to gain some momentum. Freedom4, a collaboration between Intel and Internet service provider Pipex, is working with Milton Keynes Council to build a city-wide WiMax network for businesses and consumers.

Given such a wide choice of ways to connect users and the glut of device types, one of the biggest challenges facing CIOs in coming years looks likely to be calculating what works best for the business. Already, reports Forrester, 32% of enterprises have no standard list of approved mobile devices. Unless that changes soon, IT faces a challenge in supporting the variety of incoming devices and limiting visibility of the data that resides on those devices (data that is often much less protected than that held inside the firewall). But even as organisations see mobile technology as offering further opportunities, they need to look seriously at ways of gaining complete control over these mobile assets – “before things get out of control”, says Forrester’s Gray.

Further reading

Agile ERP - how MDM is transforming ERP into a modern business application

Master plan - creating data consistency across the enterprise

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