Innovation

By Dave Trowbridge

Water is called the "universal solvent" because it dissolves more substances than any other liquid. Mobility — anywhere, anytime connectivity — might be called the universal solvent for the enterprise because of its similar effect on communication barriers. Increased mobility, whether inside the enterprise with wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, or outside with wireless WAN (WWAN) connectivity, can speed communication, increase access to critical information, and give a huge boost to employee productivity. A recent Inside Cisco IT article (LINK to "What Good Is Wireless") illustrates the magnitude of the benefits that WLAN connectivity can deliver for intra-corporate communications.

The impact of wide-area mobility not only provides great benefits to an organization, it also presents IT with some challenges. For example, problems can arise if you approach wide-area mobility as just another set of technologies, without acknowledging its transformative nature. "You have to rethink how you're doing things," says Andrés Carvallo, CIO of Austin Energy, a Texas utility. "It will challenge all your processes, and you have to think out of the box from the beginning." At the very least, keep in mind that it won't be business as usual for IT, and be prepared for surprises.

The Walls Come Down

Perhaps the first thing that dissolves when you add wide-area mobility to your enterprise is the concept of a security perimeter. "The old model of the enterprise is like a medieval city," says Rien Dijkstra, IT Architect at Dutch Railways. "Inside the city walls you knew everyone and felt safe. But when you add outside mobility to the enterprise, the walls come down. It becomes more like a modern city, very dynamic, where you don't know everyone, and establishing trust is a great deal harder — and much more important." Little wonder that last year, IDC noted that worldwide mobile security license and maintenance revenue exceeded $200 million and predicted that it will grow at a healthy rate through 2011.

Highly publicized thefts of laptops containing sensitive data from organizations as various as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Boeing, and AIG have highlighted the risks attendant on increased mobility even without wireless connectivity. And, according to Mark Boyed, vice president of IT at Zomax, a logistics company, it gets worse the more portable a mobile device is. "Losing a PDA or a Blackberry can have the same security consequences as losing a laptop, only it happens far more often. In fact, we've never lost a laptop, but about 10 percent of our users are going to lose their Blackberry at some point."

These devices' wireless wide-area connectivity just increases the risk: in the wrong hands they can create an instant opening in your enterprise's defenses. At the very least, tools that can be used to remotely wipe a misplaced or stolen device are a must. Enforcing the same kind of security on them as is used on laptops is unrealistic due to user expectations, and even on their laptops, Boyed points out, users often try to remove simple password protection. With PDAs and Blackberries, people expect instant connectivity and have very little patience with any form of security that requires extra steps. Less intrusive methods such as biometrics, while more expensive, may pay off by decreasing the time spent by IT trying to enforce security on unwilling users.

Keeping Up With The Users

Perhaps the biggest issue you're likely to encounter with increased mobility is managing user expectations. "Now that users are on the road," says Dijkstra, "it's a lot harder to provide the same level of support they've gotten used to on the inside. You no longer automatically know where they are, or even how they're connected." At the very least, he points out, your help desk processes will have to be adapted to compensate for the relative lack of this kind of information. And, he adds, "Of course, the end user doesn't think about this, so you'll get complaints about the lack of support even if you're doing a great job under the circumstances."

He says that the expectations users learn from their phone providers can be a particular problem. "Managers come to me and tell me it's easier to get new services from the phone company than from IT." But, Dijkstra notes, that's a matter of managing expectations, which is a major part of preparing your enterprise for mobility. "When I ask them if they ever tried to get those services for all their neighbors at the same time without compromising their privacy, then they understand."

Boyed agrees with the importance of managing user expectations at all levels of the enterprise, and notes a particular problem with wide-area mobility. "Users have been conditioned by their cell phone providers to think of connectivity in terms of ‘bars.' But just because you have four or five bars doesn't mean you have a good enough connection to synchronize with the corporate server." He notes that the coverage maps consumers see don't tell the whole story, and that true digital coverage maps are pretty sparse by comparison, especially in rural areas. "We have one facility in Utah where the provider's coverage is so spotty that we had to install cellular repeaters just so people could use their Blackberries internally."

I Want My Data Now

These same user expectations can have a major impact on network bandwidth and server load, as well, which requires careful sizing of your network infrastructure. Boyed points out just one of the considerations involved. "With PDAs, synchronization schedules are usually determined by the user, and they want as close to real-time response as they can get. So, for instance, if you haven't adjusted the maximum number of concurrent sessions allowed on your VPN server, when your PDA population reaches critical mass, you may start getting VPN ‘lockouts.' And the cause won't be immediately apparent, since even non-PDA users may be affected as well."

He adds that "We use Blackberries because they're built for near-real-time operation. This tends to make their network impact a little easier to estimate." But he notes that with both Blackberries and PDAs, when you add desktop synchronization to the mix you'll likely run into additional problems. "It's just not as clean, and harder to control."

Corporate Culture Wars

Opinions are mixed on which of the problems caused by mobility you can handle by changing your corporate culture. Carvallo says that culture change is fundamental, and that you have to understand that a lot of the problems come from a perceived loss of control on the part of users. "The human factors are critical. You have to treat it as a journey and make sure that everyone comes along and understands they're part of the solution." He notes that it's particularly important to "honor the past," rather than casting the old solutions or processes as wrong. "Real people are involved, who are proud of what they've done. Make sure they know it's not that they're wrong, but that you're giving them the tools to do an even better job."

His experience at Austin Energy with field service personnel illustrates how CIOs can use that pride to their advantage, as well as an example of the benefits to be gained from mobility. "Our field service automation efforts drastically collapsed our cycle time, and what used to take us two weeks or more to fix can now be addressed the same day, sometimes within hours. That makes the service people look like heroes, and they really like that. So they've crossed over from resisting change to actually pushing the envelope now, asking for more capabilities."

But Boyed's experience with wireless e-mail suggests that there are some cultural patterns that can't be changed, or, at least, that are easier to address by adapting the technology. "We found that regardless of how hard we try to retrain them, people respond to messages in the easiest way. Maybe they'll try to get through on the phone, and when they can't, send an e-mail instead, assuming that it will get through in a timely fashion." Zomax came up with an elegant technological solution instead. "We set up our Exchange servers to automatically page the recipient of any e-mail message sent with a priority flag. That way they don't have to remember to follow up."

The Gift of Time

Perhaps the greatest benefit of increased mobility and the pervasive automation it makes possible is increased productivity. This not only boosts your profit line, but can greatly increase employee satisfaction. In a way, this is almost a paradox, says Boyed. "You can go to dinner, get an alert, and take action immediately. That might seem to extend the workday at the expense of your personal life, but if corporate work rules are adjusted to the new reality, it actually gives you more options. Now you can take off early for your kid's soccer game without the fear of missing something important."

Andrés Carvallo saw a huge productivity boost from Austin Energy's mobility efforts, and concomitant user satisfaction. "Our field personnel used to spend a couple of hours at the beginning of the day sorting orders and planning their schedules, and a couple of hours at the end filing orders. Now, they just get into the trucks, boot up their laptop, and the orders and route for the day just show up. When they come back at the end of the day, they're done. That's four hours saved, both for us and for them."

Carvallo believes that the next frontier for mobility doesn't even involve people, at least directly. "The real benefits will come when every asset you have is IP-addressable — sort of asset management on steroids." This is the foundation of Austin Energy's efforts to build the world's first smart power grid; the utility already has 200,000 smart meters in operation and is aiming for half a million by year's end. "It's machine-to-machine connectivity that's the foundation of the greatest benefits, because it enables you to collect and aggregate a tremendous amount of real-time data. Link this with appropriate back-end processing, true anywhere-anytime connectivity for your employees, and, as long as you've developed the right processes to support all this, you're going to see tremendous synergy."