The Travails of the Mobile Employee
Asynchronous mobile applications can finally offer relief

By Alper Turgut, February 04, 2002
Despite the tangible gains businesses have reaped from enterprise automation software, why do the vast majority of employees still lose access to this critical resource the minute they leave their desks? Even with cell phones, PDAs, and wireless laptops, anyone from a field technician to a frequently traveled executive will feel immediately out of touch once they become mobile. In business centers such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, intermittent and low bandwidth connections continue to greatly hinder access to central office resources. When wireless access is achieved, most of the mobile application solutions to date still leave users wanting. Paper-based record keeping and data entry or late night laptop synchronization sessions in a hotel room remain the only options for the average employee.

Are Clipboards and Paper to Continue Their Dominance?

If we look at an example of a typical field services engineer, who could be visiting "anywhere remote U.S.A.," you have to honestly ask yourself if there is any cost or time justification for replacing paper-based processes given the current state of wireless technology. Clipboard and paper work orders in hand, these technicians may have sophisticated tools to work on telephone cables, plant equipment, copier machines, or lab equipment, but they remain largely untouched by the sophisticated business systems back in the office. In this current environment, what are some of the costs that an enterprise faces because of the lack of adequate mobile solutions?

First, resources are not appropriately allocated in a timely fashion. Frequently, field workers begin the day with a list of recently printed work orders. Little flexibility exists to alter, add, or delete jobs throughout the course of the day. A telephone call, of course, presents itself as a fix of last resort, consuming much time and cost from staffing the needed call centers. As the day progresses, it becomes ever more difficult to track jobs and personnel while they move from work order to work order. Anyone who has ever required the services of a technician knows that the later in the day that your appointment was scheduled, the less likely it will be fulfilled at the time requested. Since the home office doesn't know exactly when jobs conclude, companies cannot easily redeploy personnel or add/alter jobs to fill in gaps in the work schedule. Equally important, little knowledge exists about when and where these gaps occurred, meaning the same flawed deployment strategies will continue without resolution. Costs come in the form of delayed scheduling of work orders, overtime to catch-up with existing jobs, extra staffing to manage phones and emergencies, frequent downtime since larger time lags occur with such inflexibility in resource reallocation, and perhaps most costly of all, growing dissatisfaction in customer service among customers.

Another loss from the lack of adequate mobile applications is that automated workflow processes (and certainly any hope of continuous process improvement) remain largely outside the ream of possibility. Typical enterprise workflow systems (these could include sales force automation, field force automation, enterprise resource planning, etc.) have broken down the various steps associated with work activities and automated much of the data access, processing, and entry required for execution. They can also enforce the following of procedure, allow for the continuous updating and sharing of information, and often have tracking capabilities to help spot problems and, ideally, improve the workflow process itself.



It is possible to have elements of workflow with the paper-based systems. However, the field forces now relying on such a system find that enforcement is difficult and unreliable; the costs associated with data processing and frequent inaccurate input are huge; and any hope of timely, shared access to information remain out of the question.

What should a field engineer do? Does the technology exist to extend the same automated office systems to him/her despite wireless limitations? The hardware certainly exists. What can be done about the connectivity and inadequate software?

Early Mobile Solutions Were Lacking

All things being equal, a field engineer wishes to simply have the same sort of access to the backend business system that the deskbound workers have. The challenge is to get updates to and from employees in ever-shorter cycles without requiring any personnel down time; no enterprise wants to incur the cost of workers sitting and waiting as connections and/or the latest synch finish. First-generation mobile solutions for field services simply tried to include reinforced laptops and telephone line connectivity equipment with mobile personnel. Much of the equipment proved expensive and cumbersome, and finding opportunities to connect to the corporate networks was rare. Clipboards and paper still prevailed.

The Internet and the introduction of a more diverse collection of mobile devices brought with it the hope of always-available Web applications for the mobile worker. This dream was and still is unrealistic. Continuously connected wireless devices simply do not exist. Partially due to the connectivity problem, little has been done to render existing Web applications on mobile devices with their extremely limited screen real estate and disparate application capabilities. The thought of the maintenance cost alone from transforming these ever evolving Web applications to suit these diverse devices elicits trepidation from most of us.

Always-available, Asynchronous Applications Offer Relief

Fortunately, new technologies and methodologies have now come to the forefront. In particular, synchronization technologies bundled with new mobile client applications represent a great opportunity. Realizing the impracticality of continuous connectivity, the mobile worker needs client-side applications that can run asynchronously from the central server, presenting and processing data as required. When wireless connectivity exists, these applications can, automatically or manually, synch with a central server.



You must still give consideration to deployment strategies. You ultimately want to shorten the cycle between synchronizations as much as feasible -- the more frequent the updates, the better your resource allocation and process control. Connectivity costs and availability as well as device costs and capabilities will be the prime determinants of just how connected to the office the mobile worker can become.

Equally important, we can't forget to adopt a suitable mobile client architecture. Implemented incorrectly, client applications present foreboding maintenance issues. We all realize our companies have extensive, preexisting investments in automated enterprise infrastructures. As an example, applications built and deployed around a J2EE framework have "componentized" many of the business systems and data in leading corporations. Who wants to give this up or rebuild it from scratch? For this case in point, a new client-side deployment framework, in the form of J2ME, offers a way to simply extend these existing J2EE components to a growing number of mobile devices. In addition, technologies, such as a mobile application server, essentially make the mobile client component just another extension of the underlying J2EE architecture.



Tied to built-in and customizable synchronization logic, J2ME architected applications become always available, asynchronous applications. Such applications mimic much of the required environment back at the office on any wireless device, while offering substantial mobility gains due to their ability to continue to operate in both connected and disconnected states. Automated workflow systems and methodology can finally reach the mobile workforce.

A New Day for the Mobile Worker

Always available, asynchronous applications provide a conduit to the enterprise backend, while dealing with the network limitations of the wireless environment. Mobile device and applications in hand, the newly emerged mobile employee can access many of the backend systems and data available to the deskbound. The benefits of pre-built workflow management systems can now reach field workers, executives on the go, or the salesperson making rounds to client sites. Problems with poor staffing allocations, costly call centers, infrequent work updates, inaccessible information, and inaccuracies in data processing begin to recede with the greater availability of backend resources.

Just as the enterprise already has its backend infrastructure in place, mobile application infrastructure now exist to mobilize the enterprise. Synchronization technology and widely recognized application frameworks, such as J2EE and J2ME, have made this possible. Automation and process control now have their place among the mobile workforce.

About the author:
Alper Turgut is President of Aligo, Inc., the leader in mobile applications server software. For more information on Aligo's mobile application platform and object-to-object synchronization capabilities, please visit www.aligo.com.

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