Mobile Working

Technologies and Business Strategies

Mahmood Hussain Shah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134637447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Improvements in information and communication technologies (ICTs) have brought about a sea change in the ways in which most people in the industrialized world work. In many organizations the ability to "work remotely" or "telecommute" has helped productivity improve. However, many of the benefits promised by the onset of "mobile working" have failed to materialize. This book explains the technology and strategic issues surrounding mobile working and presents a clear analysis of how this process can be managed.

Combining a better understanding of the state of the art in e-business technologies with a focus on how organizations can effectively provide information support for mobile working, this book will also investigate the relationship between human and organizational factors and success in mobile working.

With detailed case studies from a range of countries, this book will be useful reading on a range of courses at Masters and MBA level, including e-business, mobile technologies, operations management, technology management and change management.

1

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK AND MOBILE WORKING

 

 

 

The past decade has seen dramatic advances in mobile technologies in terms of functionality, power, usability, connectivity and affordability. Therefore they have become widespread among individuals in the most advanced countries. These smart mobile devices can also be used by a variety of organizations to run their operations, a phenomenon often referred to as mobile working. Organizations generally make investments in mobile working systems to deliver business value. The nature of this value can range from efficiency and cost reduction, to operational effectiveness, to possibly providing a source of competitive advantage.

Several factors, described by Schrott and Gluckler (2004), have contributed to the decision to invest in mobile technologies. First, immense efforts have been undertaken towards restructuring in order to reduce the level of hierarchy within organizations and to create more permeable internal and external boundaries. Employees do not have to be co-located with their colleagues to interact. Instead, the vision of future work scenarios constitutes settings in which globally distributed individuals may work together simultaneously without sharing physical co-presence. The second factor that has contributed to this development has been the availability of technological infrastructure. Third, the number of providers for mobile devices has been increasing steadily. The variety of personal digital assistants, notebooks, tablets with mobile access and smart phones has never been greater. Finally, the shrinking costs of data transmission and the sponsoring of devices have additionally catalysed the distribution of mobile technologies and amplified the growth of the worldwide mobile market. Together with a strong emphasis on collaboration and group work, these factors have led to the establishment of mobile working as an integral part of many people's daily working life.

Despite the above mentioned popularity of mobile devices, the expected rise in mobile working has not materialized yet, but the arrival of new smart phones and tablets, along with other developments mentioned in this chapter, could possibly produce the right conditions for the long-predicted ‘take-off’. First, there is the phenomenal rise in prominence of a new generation of digitally literate consumers who have acquired familiarity with new technologies through the constant use of online culture (such as social networking sites) and the need for mobile phones as an essential product for their everyday lives. Second, the availability of technically safer and speedier internet connections could bring about greater trust in the use of mobile technologies by people as well as providing greater security against fraud. Third, major investment in the infrastructure of mobile communications has resulted in big players seeing mobile working as a source of return and investment along with individual consumers, so they actively develop mobile working solutions and promote them aggressively.

Advancements in mobile internet-technology are of pivotal importance when discussing how fast mobile working might achieve the levels of future growth ascribed to it by optimistic trend forecasters. The introduction of third, and subsequently fourth, generation ‘smart phones’ that will allow subscribers convenience and ease of access to surf the world wide web at ever-increasing speeds appears to provide the security and assurance needed by businesses in general to enable mobile working to leap forward in line with confident predictions in the sector.

Workers' complaints, up to now, have centred on technical deficiencies, especially the combination of sluggish internet connections, which take a long time to load web pages, and the fact that, once loaded, the connections are often quickly lost. Reports of difficulties in typing information on a small, mobile device's keypad or errors in input on touch screen keypads are also common. However, with the introduction of smart phones and tablets onto the market by marquee brands such as Apple, HTC, Samsung and Nokia, those problems of weak connection and awk-ward-to-use keys appear to have been resolved by virtue of the increased capacity of 4G connections, with higher data speeds and easy-to-use touch-screen keyboards. These innovations afford the potential to change the way people use mobile devices, and therefore make it possible to bridge the gap between the expectations and actual experience of businesses with regards to mobile working.

One of the challenges faced in reading the literature is discerning whether or not scholars are writing about, or indeed considering, the same or similar questions or concepts. The literature can be very confusing in this respect. Often, similar terms are used in different ways and have different meanings attached to them. In this section, key terms and concepts encountered in the literature are compared, contrasted and defined. The objective of this initial analysis is to provide a platform for a uniform assessment and understanding of what it is that is being considered in the literature.

It's important that we define mobile working at the beginning of this book. Mobile working for example is different from simply remote working or home working. For the purpose of our research, mobile working means ‘enabling workers to work away from home or the office by providing them with suitable mobile input/output devices and relevant resources and managerial support’.

Mobile working may be confused with Mobile Commerce or M-commerce. For the purpose of this book, we will use the Oxford Dictionary definition which defines it as ‘commercial transactions conducted electronically by mobile phone’ (www­.ox­for­ddi­cti­ona­rie­s.c­om) and may be understood, therefore, to include the commercial use of any hand-held device with the capacity to utilize a portable internet connection, such as PDAs, mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers via a dongle.

The above explanation may imply that any use of mobile devices for work purposes is mobile working, but for the purpose of this book, we will portray mobile working as a much more comprehensive business solution. It often requires good computing infrastructure within a company as well as a comprehensive re-organization of a company in terms of human resources and the way its operations work. This book is providing an overview of these technological and business issues.

2

AN OVERVIEW

Mobile working

Case study: Automobile Association (AA)

This case study was prepared by the author to facilitate class discussion rather than illustrate effective or ineffective management practices. Only publicly available material has been used to write this case and it does not reflect any opinions of employees or management at this organization.

For the Automobile Association (AA), a motor breakdown service, mobile technology has brought real-time communication to a workforce that has always been predominantly field-based (Antony 2004). On the road, the organization has over 3,500 patrol staff, managers and engineers using laptops for computerized vehicle diagnosis and communication with control centres. It also has 180 employed staff working from home, taking emergency calls routed to them as if they were in a call centre, plus traditional office-based staff working flexibly.

From a human resource point of view, the AA sees regular meetings between mobile staff and managers and sets clear performance objectives as a key to managing staff. They also see a change of management approach as essential to making mobile working a success. Sarah Stacey, HR business manager for the AA, says

There has to be face-to-face interaction because it's easy for individuals to become isolated. Crucially, it needs a change in attitude. Management has to relax and move from a mindset of physical presence to one of outcomes and clearly defined measures and objectives.

AA patrol staff and engineers have always worked in the field so suitability for working alone is a selection criterion of the role. But transforming office based staff into ‘virtual call centre’ workers meant HR needed to ensure they were suited to working at home.

They had a mixed experience in this regard. It worked well in many cases and productivity was higher. In other cases, individuals have come back into the office. For some people, the social interaction of working is very important to be able to perform well. Although there have been challenges managing mobile workers for the AA, it has paid off. They claim that mobile working gives them tremendous flexibility. They can turn the tap on and off quite accurately to match times when most people are driving, such as to and from work. The AA case is a human resources view and demonstrates that despite some problems, mobile working could bring many benefits to some organizations.

Introduction

This chapter will explain the concept of mobile working and discuss both the social and business drivers of mobile working as well as the key developments in technologies and business practices which make mobile working a viable option for an increasing number of organizations. Although it seems that mobile working is growing, some argue that mobile working will take a long time to be widely adopted. This is largely due to the limitations in current mobile technologies, the inability of current business structures to effectively implement and support mobile working and doubts about their benefits such as efficiency or productivity. This chapter will discuss some of these issues in detail.

Types of Mobile Working

A detailed discussion about mobile working would be incomplete without the mention of the types of mobility. We need to understand this issue from three points of views (Kakihara and Sorensen 2004), including: spatial mobility, temporal mobility and contextual mobility.

Spatial mobility

Spatial mobility is the most immediate aspect of mobility in our social lives (tourism and business travel). It may also include the mobility of objects which could follow a much more complex and diverse route than people (for example, the Sony Walkman). It may also include the mobility of symbols (for example, global satellite television networks and the Internet). It implies that physical distance is no longer a fundamental aspect of the interaction and a team or an organization can effectively work together without being in the same physical location.

Temporal mobility

By using asynchronous ICT applications (for example, email) people are able to deal with multiple tasks simultaneously. It is no longer strictly necessary to share the same time for effective interaction.

Such “instantaneity” of time in the contemporary society in general and in cyberspace in particular further increases the poly-chronicity of human activities.

Contextual mobility

Contextual mobility is about the influence of people's cultural background, particular situation or mood and mutual recognition etc., on work. Due to the advancements in mobile technology, people nowadays can easily interact with others while being relatively free from such contextual constraints, interacting with people in largely different contexts. In this sense, the relationship between interaction among people and contexts in which they are is becoming mobilized in terms of flexible patterns of interaction across different contexts.

As in Figure 2.1, all three types of mobility overlap each other. Hence, when considering mobility, or more specifically the interaction between mobile workers, we need to understand it from all three types of mobility.

The type of mobility relevant to a work context depends on whether access provided to the workers is real time online access or offline asynchronous access. Real-time accessibility requires much more robust and secure back-end systems and relatively more sophisticated mobile equipment. Asynchronous access is much cheaper and suitable for situations where a two-way real time interaction is not required, such as meter reading.

Types of mobile workers

Mobile workers are a diversified group of people. They range from healthcare providers to insurance claims adjusters to blue collar service workers. For the most part, they are accessing unique applications that specifically support their work function. Some examples of these applications include knowledge sharing, data collection, equipment maintenance, inspection and work order access. Therefore, each worker group may have its own unique considerations depending on the environment they work in and the task at hand (York and Pendharkar 2004). A survey taken by the Yankee Group Anywhere Enterprise in 2008 which was named “Large: 2008 U.S. Fixed-Mobile Convergence/IP Communications Survey” indicates mobile workers are becoming increasingly more diverse range of occupations as illustrated in Figure 2.1. There are many ways to classify these mobile workers, and one of the easiest ways to categorize these workers is to divide them by work surroundings and work habits, for example, IDC (2011a) classifies the work groups as: office-based mobile workers, non-office-based mobile workers and home-based mobile workers.

FIGURE 2.1 Three types of mobility and overlap

Office-based mobile workers

The main characteristic of office-based mobile workers is their primary workplace is the office (IDC, 2011a). And it can be divided into two categories based on work habits: mobile professionals and occasionally mobile workers. Mobile professionals are considered as any employee who is out of the office more than 20 percent of the work time. This kind of job function requires the employee to not be tied to a single physical location who need to travel, such as salespeople, business consultants, etc. Moreover, the travelling is generally between the office and visitors. Occasionally mobile workers are those whose primary work is in the office but will be away from their physical location less than 20...