Key assessments of the enterprise mobility landscape. The economic downturn means businesses must focus on enabling mobile technologies and applications, not experimentation or poorly planned pilots; these deployments needs to deliver financial and operational returns within the first three months, if not day one.
Managing mobility deployments must focus on the three fundamental principles; technology, people and processes.
Both operator pricing and bandwidth availability has resulted in the rapid growth of mobile working, 80% of the working population see mobile working as one of the top three decision points in finding an employer.¹
Confusion exists in the industry about the viability of a ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) or hosted mobility model and how to apply it.
The businesses attending were surveyed about their future focus for mobility technology, the results in order of priority were;
1. Location and tracking of employees and corporate assets
2. RFID and barcode technologies
3. Software as a service deployment models
4. Mobile media (Cameras/video)
5. Mobile payments
Is ‘Software as a Service’ (SaaS) the future of enterprise mobility?
A session moderated by Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst at Quocirca, examined whether SaaS was today a commercial reality or whether it still remains hype. The conclusion was that SaaS would not become a panacea for all businesses and that the key to success was finding the right blend of managed and owned infrastructure.
While SaaS undoubtedly provides an organisation with scalability, both for growth and downsizing, there is a point when owning and managing capital IT equipment investments in-house was more effective for businesses of a certain size. The challenge was assessing where the two provide the most benefit.
The output from the session will be a ‘how to’ guide which will address the concerns, cut through the hype and help businesses understand how a hosted or SaaS mobility model should be approached.
A number of real world examples were used to highlight the impact of enterprise mobility: Northgate is using Taskmaster to enable Domestic Energy Assessors (DEAs) to carry out the energy performance surveys and certification used in Home Information Packs.
At Northgate Taskmaster manages the workflow for the assessors as they visit each property via a PDA, allowing the DEA to capture the information required to calculate the energy rating for each property. It then provides near real-time reporting back to Northgate centrally, allowing the overall energy performance of the building to be calculated. Taskmaster also incorporates fully integrated satellite navigation which enables the DEAs to locate each property requiring a survey as well as a central diary management system.
The benefits include:
Less reliance on paper and the eradication of the potential for delays and errors;
Acceleration of the calculation process through automated ‘real time’ communications over a wireless network and a reduction in customer waiting time;
Greater efficiency through a reduction in communication costs and overheads through ‘virtually instantaneous’ access to information;
A reduction in the carbon footprint and improved environmental performance through more efficient travel and the eradication of paper
Event keynote and panel speakers were:
Steve Reynolds, Mobile Data Association, TBS
Paul Lee, Deloitte
Michael Hutchins, UFD
Rob Bamforth, Quocirca
Chris Chadwick, Aspire Housing
Paul Till, PTS
Neil Bonner Motorola
Chris Dyer Vodafone
*The net cash calculator is based upon a conservative 15% improvement in productivity. The calculator surveyed businesses that had not deployed mobile and asked a set of baseline questions including, the number of field workers and the financial costs associated in completing a single job
MYOB08
