Moving target
- Article 3 of 3
- The Agile Workforce, December 2002
Empowering mobile workers may be the goal. But supporting them in the field is another matter.
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Technology support has always been a moving target. Over the past decade organisations - and their service partners - have refined the processes for diagnosing and fixing problems with PCs and laptops, for updating user software, and for ensuring the business is not exposed by any security threat or loss of data.
When the device is within the organisation's four walls, such support can absorb many hours of technical support time. But as workers spend a larger proportion of their time outside of the office, the task of supporting and maintaining the systems that enable mobile working becomes magnified many fold. What is becoming clear is that unless the unique challenges of mobile support are addressed head on, then the agile worker can actually be less productive than their counterpart in the office, be isolated from key interaction with the organisation, and even represent a threat to it when security issues are felt unaddressed.
Distance is not the issue here. Support departments have long been able to deal with problems from afar by connecting to users' systems over a phone line and being able to view the system's in action. That allows the engineer to diagnose and fix most problems online, as well as to apply software updates.
“If a user is running around with their own device, it can be impractical to just go out and fix it. And getting users to come into the business might not be the best - or most efficient - answer either,” says Andy Greenwood, end user computing product architect for consulting and IT services company ITNet. “That clearly makes supporting a mobile worker a more demanding exercise than working on a local desktop system.”
With the emergence of Internet-centric software, that capability for dialling in remotely to devices has grown in sophistication, to the point where support staff rarely need to be physically in front of a machine to diagnose its problems. Provided the machine is not in such a poor state or so cut off from the outside world that there is no Internet connection available via dial-up, GPRS or broadband, technical helpdesks can take advantage of either built-in or previously installed tools to manage problems.
The Microsoft Windows XP operating system, for example, includes 'Remote Assistance', and Citrix and other vendors sell terminal service tools that enterprises can install onto a variety of portable and desktop devices. These provide remote desktop capabilities, so engineers can set up a connection to the device, see what its user sees, and even take control the device in order to fix it.
According to Scott Kellock, systems consultant at IT services provider Phoenix, these sorts of tools will become increasingly powerful. “If the problem is relatively straightforward, users can literally see how the engineer deals with it and fix it themselves if it reoccurs. As a result, such tools drive down support costs.”
But when these remote tools cannot help solve the problem or the device is so disabled that it cannot access the Internet, it may be necessary to take more dramatic action - to reinstall the computer's operating system and applications software. Traditionally, this has been a job for an engineer armed with a set of installer CDs, although larger enterprises have often created standard 'builds' of enterprise software that install the most commonly used software and operating system in one go. However, Windows XP's roll-back technology and other vendors' system mirroring software are now being used to take advantage of the high capacity of many modern PCs to store a backup image ready for rebuilding the system.
Mark O'Dell, head of technical support services at Connect Support Services, explains that, although it requires “a degree of nous”, it is possible to have an image of the standard software environment and operating system installed on a laptop or home PC, and by booting up 'dead' system from a floppy or CD, the device can rebuild itself from scratch from that store image.
Mirror image
But, while such an approach may reactive the applications and operating software, it typically loses all the active data from the hard drive. To provide a real solution to the problem, an ability to restore data back to the device is a prerequisite - something that has been actively pursued by organisations with a more advanced vision of worker mobility.
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