What's the fuss about... mobile and wireless?

Of course you know everything is being unshackled from the desktop but can you explain to your boss why you should spend precious budget on mobile and wireless working options? Quocirca's Dale Vile provides some perspective...

Wireless. It's been hyped, it's been trashed and it's been the source of much confusion and misinformation. We are familiar with the history - at least the part of it reported in the media. But does the initial failure of WAP, the loss of confidence in 3G and concerns over wireless LAN security mean we should just forget it all for now? Perhaps we would be best putting wireless to one side for a few years until the mobile industry gets its collective act together.

Yet recent Quocirca research has revealed a very high level of awareness and enthusiasm for wireless among senior IT people in European companies. Some 87 per cent of the 427 people interviewed during a study completed a couple of months ago said their companies are either active or planning to become active in implementing wireless solutions. Which means it's worth taking time out to consider where wireless technologies fit into the overall scheme of things.

To begin with, let us make sure we don't fall into the same trap as those who use the terms 'wireless' and 'mobile' loosely and ambiguously. For the purposes of this discussion, we will consider 'enterprise mobility' and define this as dealing with the business information and transaction needs of employees while they are away from their desks or other fixed places of work.

First, there is nothing new about mobile applications. The ability for a mobile professional to synchronise their email onto a laptop constitutes a mobile solution, as does the use of a handheld by the FedEx guy, capturing proof of delivery signatures on a doorstep.

Such examples underline the second point about enterprise mobility, which is that the use of wireless connectivity is not necessarily a prerequisite. In both of our examples, data is exchanged or synchronised with mother ship systems during an occasional wireline connection, like a LAN or dial-up.

So what's the fuss about all of this wireless stuff?

Well, there is always much talk in management circles about the benefits of streamlining communications and business processes. Better communication, for example, often translates to faster and better decisions. This is true for a sales team communicating with a head office during a negotiation or a construction team hitting a snag on site and looking for advice from a chief architect.

Teams of all kinds, in fact, tend to work more effectively when information and ideas move freely. The mobile phone has done a great deal to enable this and, quite simply, extending the idea beyond voice to provide the same kind of speed, freedom and responsiveness when exchanging emails, documents and images drives even more benefit.

There is therefore a world of difference between working in isolation while mobile, for example with an offline copy of your email synchronised when you plug in at the end of the day, and working collaboratively while mobile. It is the latter that wireless enables, which in turn forms the foundation for many business benefits, from improved internal decision making to better customer service.

When we look at more routine business processes that involve activity in the field such as goods delivery, installation, servicing and repair, we see a whole new set of benefits. Mobile technology has been used in this context for many years with dramatic returns on investment simply from the elimination of paper. If delivery or job information is captured at the point of execution through an electronic form, administration overhead associated with re-keying and checking is significantly reduced.

If we introduce wireless into this equation, we can add near real time visibility of goods and personnel movement and continuous communication with field-based workers. This allows just in time planning and job scheduling to make better use of resources and provide better response to customers. It also allows advanced notification of potential issues allowing problems to be prevented or their impact minimised. All such things have an impact on both the top and the bottom line.

The fuss about wireless is therefore because it is a significant enabler of business benefit, much of which can be quantified very easily depending on context. Many European corporates already realise this and, again, Quocirca research demonstrates a high level of appreciation of the value of wireless.

Sixty-eight per cent of senior IT people told us that there is either a 'compelling' or 'quite strong' business case for providing wireless access to generic office applications such as email, diary and contact management. A further 18 per cent said the business case is 'borderline', less than 2 per cent said it is 'weak' and the remainder did not have a view.

Opinions varied by industry on the strength of the business case for providing wireless access to line of business applications. Clearly field service automation, logistics and so on are not relevant to all companies. Where they are relevant, however, we saw roughly the same proportion of companies (around 70 per cent) indicating there is a compelling or respectable business case across the main classes of application.

The business value is therefore not in question. There is a problem with wireless, however, in that it is all too easy to get distracted from the 'Why?', namely the benefits, and get bogged down in confusing and sometimes conflicting detail associated with the 'How?'

Contrary to popular belief, we are not awaiting technology or lacking solutions. There are actually more viable ways of implementing enterprise mobility today than anyone needs, even without 3G. It is possible to implement wireless LAN securely with the right approach, GPRS is definitely fast enough for most serious business applications and middleware exists to make the use of relatively fragile cellular networks practical in the context of real world requirements.

The trick is to start with the business process, the user and the objectives, then offer the various technologies or approaches against these to see if they fit.

Next time: the significance of specific mobile technologies.

**Quocirca is a leading, user-facing analyst house known for its focus on the 'big picture'. For a full summary of its activities see www.quocirca.com, or reach the company's founding directors by emailing quocirca@silicon.com.

Also in this series:
What's the fuss about... server consolidation?
http://www.silicon.com/a56018