IT Managers have become used to supporting the laptops of mobile executives but are finding that there is an increasingly visible hole in their strategy to support field workers on the road.
Managing remote laptops has now become a standard part of IT support systems as busy, time-constrained executives demand that their problems are sorted out quickly. Over the years, applications have been developed that help IT Managers to meet the expected service levels of these senior managers. And yet, arguably more important business critical processes are at risk as employees on the road with the new breed of hand held devices find themselves without the equivalent help. It is a real hole that IT managers need to address.
Over the last few years industries such as parcel carriers and field support services have moved from paper based systems to mobile systems that enable them to communicate directly with their office systems. The use of mobile equipment has been a key component in extending IT systems out on to the road, with business processes being monitored and managed right in to the customer’s premises, revolutionising the service levels that companies can offer.
But when things go wrong the whole process can stop! Unlike PC applications, mobile device management applications are not nearly as well established and this can really undermine an IT manager’s ability to provide consistent support in a way that keeps the business going. If badly managed, serious time can be lost as devices need to be brought back to HQ to be fixed or have their software upgraded.
The problem is that suppliers of mobile devices have been slow to offer industrial strength applications to manage their devices. More interested in delivering hardware, they often provide management software that is simply not up to the job of dealing with the real issues faced when devices fail in the field. This should be no surprise and simply follows a pattern already established in the PC world. After all, it is not to the PC manufacturers that IT managers look when they need applications to manage both the software on their executives’ laptops and the laptops themselves.
As Julie Purves, Managing Director of B2M Solutions says, “We are in a similar situation to PC applications of ten or so years ago. Organisations ran bespoke built-in applications, but very soon the requirement was for an integrated system. Exactly the same thing will occur in the mobile environment. We are already seeing that organisations that are moving to second or third generation mobile systems have started to learn these lessons and are including device management in the ‘must have’ list of requirements.”
B2M was set up by Julie as a result of experiencing the practical problems of implementing large scale mobile device projects and finding that there were no real answers to the key issues: How do you fix a remote mobile device when the software fails, so that field staff do not have to come in to the office? Can you reboot the device remotely? How do you upgrade software when the devices are in the field and keeping key business process going? How well are people using the devices? And where are all those devices anyway?
One organisation found it had lost 1/5th of all its devices within a year. Unlike laptops, field workers have little emotional relationship with their mobile devices which are only used for business tasks. The result is that they often do not take the care that an executive takes in keeping their laptop safe.
IT Managers are now waking up to the problem. With more and more second generation mobile systems being implemented, the need is to learn from the more advanced users, the mistakes that have been made, and the solutions that are being put in place to avoid these problems in the future.