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Flexible Working and Mobility

Today's mobile working tools fulfil a dual role; offering an attractive lifestyle to staff, whilst increasing their productivity away from the office. Flexible working is not a technology, but a business model supported by a group of technologies: wireless networking; broadband communications; extranets and instant messaging. Add mobile telephony and these form a new mobile business lifestyle.

Mobility: A New Norm for Business

IDC says that the potential mobile workforce in the UK will rise to 15.4 million in 2005, representing just over 50 per cent of the entire workforce, with 90 per cent of organisations predicting an increase of more than 10 per cent in their mobile budgets. In March 2005, a Gartner survey of 625 small and medium-sized businesses found that more than a quarter of staff now do some work from home.

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Says Duncan Brown, UK Consulting Director IDC UK, "We believe that mobility, having demonstrated a proven business case, will now grow rapidly into a core infrastructural technology. And the increasingly mobile nature of the working environment is forcing companies to take a more critical look at their business in terms of gaining optimal efficiency, productivity and general business continuity."

According to a survey of FTSE-100 companies, mobility solutions are also exceeding expectations for those forward-thinking companies already taking the plunge:

Anticipated v. Actual productivity gains from implementation of flexible working systems, from a 2004 survey of FTSE-100 companies by Citrix.

According to analysts Ovum, the most commonly used features are the sending/receiving of email and the use of calendar/contact-management applications. Once discredited technologies – such as “push” (where information is pushed to, rather than requested by, a user) – are also having their day in the always-on broadband and 3G world. Sales teams, for example, are having vital leads pushed to them in real-time via their PDAs.

Growth Areas: Wireless and Mobile

By far the most ubiquitous business device is the mobile phone, but IDC’s Brown says that many people still view the mobile as a voice-only device, “By using converged mobile devices [smartphones and PDAs] previous "dead time", such as travelling to and from meetings can be utilised.

"Through the use of wireless hotspots in public places, there is further opportunity for mobile workers to use their laptops to access email, Web and other Internet applications on the move."

IDC director of mobile communications Lars Vestergaard says that 73 per cent of organisations in the UK and Ireland see benefits from investment in mobile workers and the technology to meet their needs, while 70 per cent of organisations have a positive attitude towards WLAN (wireless local-area network) “hotspots” – mobile Internet access points for Wi-Fi [wide- or wireless-fidelity] enabled portable computers.

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Security Concerns

That said, Gartner sounded a note of caution in August 2005. Its survey of more than 2,000 business travellers in the US and UK showed they use Wi-Fi hot spots relatively infrequently, and barriers to more extensive use remain - chief among these being security, say Gartner’s Delia MacMillan and Ian Keene.

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"Nobody in an IT department gets fired for saying 'security'," says Vestergaard, "but security is the worst possible reason not to go for mobility. Mobile [technologies] can be as secure as any part of the network."

But what if devices are stolen or lost? This consideration comes under the heading of mobile managed services and mobile device management (MDM), says Vestergaard, an area some enterprises consider outsourcing. “You can notify your company or outsourcer that your PDA has been stolen, and they can kill off the device or the content OTA [over the air] and render it useless."

Security is essentially a factor of good management, says analysts Ovum; requiring the same disciplines as local security: patches, anti-virus updates and current, licensed software. For Vestergaard, security is always about managing mobility as a business process, not as a technology problem. "The more companies have a data strategy, the less they are afraid of security," he says.

The Quiet Revolution

However, for many employees at all levels, flexible working is not about strategy, security, or competitiveness, but a satisfactory work/life balance. Gartner analyst Caroline Jones terms this “the quiet revolution” of teleworking, predicting that by 2008 41 million corporate employees globally will spend at least one day a week teleworking, and almost 100 million will work from home at least one day a month.

Of course, many industries were “flexible” and “mobile” before the enabling technologies existed. But what has changed for many is that – alongside staff – the bedrocks of their business are now data, data management, data security, and real-time collaboration.

When information is your business and it is valued not by its scarcity but by the speed at which it moves, then travel time, flexitime, and out-of-office hours can become as efficient and productive as possible with a flexible working model supported by wireless communications.

About the author:

Chris Middleton is a widely respected writer and editor. His career includes editorship of the UK's most successful B2B IT monthly, Computer Business Review, and formerly deputy editor of one of the UK's 'big two' technology weeklies, Computing, Chris has written features for The Guardian newspaper, the BBC, PC World, and various other magazines and newspapers. He is the author of the report 'Digital Rights Management: Strategies for Rich Media Content', published by Juniper Research in 2005. Chris has also edited and contributed to over 20 books on the digital arts.

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Further Reading

Find out how UK organisations of all types have succeeded in implementing flexible working solutions.

Sources

Travelers Have Mixed Feelings About Wi-Fi Hot Spots

Delia MacMillan and Ian Keene, Gartner Research, August 2005

How to Define a Collaboration Strategy That Drives Business Value

Betsy Burton, Gartner Research, July 2005

Assess the Business Value of Mobile and Wireless Applications

Bill Kirwin and Phillip Redman, Gartner Research, July 2005

Best Practices for Delivering Business Value From Collaboration

Betsy Burton, Gartner Research, May 2005

Mobility, Not Cost Savings, Is the Driving Force for 'Cutting the Cord'

Phillip Redman and Bob Hafner, Gartner Research, May 2005

User Survey: Demand for Teleworking Among SMBs, Western Europe, 2004

Susan Richardson, Gartner Research, March 2005

Teleworking, The Quiet Revolution

Caroline Jones, Gartner Research, September 2004

Management Update: Managing the Mobile and Wireless Workforce

John Girard, Gartner Research, April 2004

Business Case Creation: How To Quantify the Benefits of a Mobilized Workforce

Duncan Brown, IDC, 2005

Mobile Location-based Services

Juniper Research, June 2005

Next Steps
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Further Reading
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Find out how UK organisations of all types have succeeded in implementing flexible working solutions
•  The Future Role of Trust in Work: 21st Century Workers Facing 'Big Brother' Business Threat
Find out how the information worker is transforming the way we work in our exclusive research.
•  The New World of Work
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