Midsize business mobile technologies you can manage
Businesses are grappling with increasingly complex midsize business mobile technologies options. How do you craft and manage a mobile IT strategy that is flexible for the business but also realistic for the IT department?
In Summary
| • | Choose mobile devices based on business (not necessarily individual) needs. |
| • | Establish corporate standards for devices. |
| • | Determine IT support policies. |
Does this sound familiar? The information technology (IT) department deploys computers within the company to support its people. The employees, however, discover a new generation of technological devices that enables them to be even more productive, and they lobby the IT department to support the devices. The IT director faces a moment of truth: how to handle these interlopers?
This scenario played out a quarter-century ago when personal computers first stormed the bastions of minicomputers so solidly entrenched in midsize companies. The same battle is raging today, except that now the devices are highly powerful and portable personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones and multimedia-enabled mobile phones.
For IT, creating a strategy for managing midsize business mobile technologies requires more than just technical insights. You need a clear understanding of how employees will be using these devices and what kind of performance and support they will need. The need for alignment between the IT department and business heads is never more urgent than in the discussion of mobility.
Aligning device needs to business needs
Consultants recommend starting with the work processes and the information people need to do their jobs—that is, what drives the smart deployment of mobile devices, not the desire of an executive who saw a friend with a cool gadget and wanted the same thing himself. "Think about establishing standards rather than establishing control," says Jim Archer, vice president of solutions at Microsoft Certified Partner Astea International, a Horsham, Pennsylvania-based developer of field service applications.
Consider how Copenhagen, Denmark-based Bramidan's field service technicians use their mobile devices. The technicians who work for this manufacturer of industrial waste equipment each have a 3.5-ton truck filled with replacement parts. Here is how the process works, according to Chief Executive Officer Henrik Madsen:
1. | Each afternoon, a supervisor tallies pending service calls and assigns them. |
2. | When the technicians climb into their trucks the following morning, the day's calls appear on the screen of an Intermec 700C, a ruggedized mobile device running the Microsoft Windows for Pocket PC operating system. |
3. | When the service call ends, the technician brings a form up on the screen, tallies his time, selects the parts he sold to the customer from a list, and transmits it back to the Microsoft Dynamics NAV business management software at headquarters. |
4. | The customer invoices go out electronically from the Microsoft Dynamics NAV system the following day, and the Microsoft Dynamics NAV inventory model alerts production managers to reorder inventory. |
For a business process to become this efficient requires a lot of thought on the part of IT regarding the mobile devices and the applications running on them. In Bramidan's case, the company needed ruggedized devices that could withstand the wear and tear from technicians going into the bowels of restaurants, hotels and factories, where the floors are concrete and level surfaces are few.
Second, the devices had to have enough memory and storage capacity to handle the entire inventory list (the 700C offers 64MB of RAM and 32MB of flash memory). Once the technicians plug the devices back into the cradle in the truck, they transmit the invoice information. From a software standpoint, IT had to ensure that the invoicing application accommodated the entire universe of potential replacements, and that it could efficiently and easily exchange information with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Now apply this scenario to your people, taking into account other needs. Your field service technicians, for example, may need to be able to print receipts for customers or to swipe credit cards for payment. Salespeople may require laptops in order to deliver state-of-the-art presentations, but they may also need access to inventory information. At the same time, they may also need an advanced mobile telephone for checking e-mail and updating calendars easily between appointments or from the airport. As always, the application will drive the choice of the device, not the other way around, but the IT staff has the best sense of what kinds of devices can accommodate each of these key capabilities.
Device management and support: keeping it simple
Given today's needs, it is unlikely that your company will be able to standardize on a single device. The laptop is a de facto standard for computing, and most employees need mobile phones to stay in touch when out of the office. Then there is the whole world of multipurpose PDAs like the Palm, the Blackberry and the Pocket PC. "Everyone is looking for the killer device," says David Leadbetter, head of the Infrastructure, Solution Delivery and Integration group at Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Capgemini, in London. In these days of constantly expanding choice, IT managers have to deal with a maddening and ever-changing smorgasbord.
That does not mean, however, you should let people choose whatever they want. Consultants recommend limiting the choices to no more than three mobile devices (excluding the laptop), and looking for other ways to simplify their management through standardization. For instance, if one set of devices uses Windows Mobile 5.0, it will be easier from a management standpoint if you do not also support devices still running the Microsoft Pocket PC operating system (OS), or a non–Microsoft OS. Similarly, consider how you can efficiently integrate mobile applications with back-office applications. Can the mobile applications use Microsoft's .Net or BizTalk technologies to integrate applications, or is it necessary to use Web services options from other vendors? Through consistent technologies, Leadbetter says, you avoid managing multiple methods of data exchange between mobile and other applications.
By limiting the number of devices, you are also simplifying the challenge of upgrading and replacing the devices. Another suggestion: store mobile applications on SD (secure digital) memory cards, and upgrade the device by swapping out the card.
Admittedly, you have to balance IT resources with the needs of the users. Now, as in the old days, IT might have concerns about losing control over the computers—and hence the data—in the company. "You cannot be fearful of the loss of the control because it's inevitable," warns Astea's Jim Archer. But it's also important to remember what the business gains from deploying mobile devices at the place users can be most effective with data collection: "You are actually gaining control of more information."
 | Silicon Valley-based freelancer Howard Baldwin writes regularly for the Microsoft Midsize Business Center. His work has also appeared on AllBusiness.com and in CIO. |
