Overcoming the Challenge of Mobilizing an Information Worker
As you're walking down the street one day, you pass two people carrying mobile devices. The first is a technician for the utility company carrying a rugged, industrial-style device and is performing complex data capture. The other individual is an executive who is carrying a sleek and powerful device that she uses exclusively for wireless e-mail access. The technician has a mobile line-of-business application that can do any task he might need to perform, but the executive just has e-mail. So if she needs to look up some data from a business system while she's on the move, what is she to do? She sends an e-mail to someone in the office to look up the data for her. Does this sound familiar?
While the market for enterprise mobility has evolved dramatically over the last decade, an extremely intriguing dichotomy has emerged. On one hand, the mainstream adoption of sophisticated task automation solutions for industrial, blue-collar applications have achieved critical mass. On the other side of the spectrum, wireless e-mail devices have reached essential ubiquity within white-collar professional environments, but very few have business applications beyond an appointment book, phone book, document manager and e-mail. The vast majority of information-centric business applications are still relegated to desktop/laptop environments, even though the mobile information workers have the mobile and wireless technology to take specific subsets of functionality with them wherever they might be located. So why is there such a dramatic gap in enterprise mobile investment?
Ruggedized, industrial-style devices are commonly used for very sophisticated mobile enterprise applications.
Even though many white collar professionals carry powerful mobile devices, most only have access to basic applications like email>>
The who and what of mobility
Even though the market for mobile technology has been rapidly maturing, there are still some fundamental elements which suffer from widespread confusion. Not the least of which are the underlying questions of, What is mobility? and Who is a mobile worker? Depending on who you talk to, you will receive widely varying definitions.
Some people view mobility as the ability to work from more than one single location. So if you work from home, then from the office, or even from a coffee shop, they will consider you a mobile worker. Even if you were to walk down the hall from your cubicle to the conference room, you would be considered a mobile worker. I refer to this as Occasional Mobility, where work is performed while sitting stationary with a desktop or laptop.
Other people only view mobility as the ability to work while actually moving around. So if you need to walk around while you're working, then they would consider you a mobile worker. I call this Constant Mobility, which is distinguished as movement from point A to point B where work is performed along the way.
In the middle is a group of mobile workers that may actually be more common than either of the other two, but is much less widely recognized. These workers would exhibit characteristics of both Occasionally Mobile and Constantly Mobile in that they move from point to point with much of the work done stationary at one end, but some work may actually be performed along the way. I refer to this situation as Hybrid Mobility, and the most unique aspect of this type of mobility is that many workers could operate much more efficiently this way, if only they had the software to further enable the devices they currently carry.
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