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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Phil Flavin, chief technology officer of solutions at BT, outlines how, at his company, each laptop is programmed to back up its data at regular intervals when the user is online or as they log out. The same system, but in reverse, allows the company to roll out software updates and patches to these occasionally connected users.
“When a homeworker gets set up, they get a standard PC connected to the Internet and use a preinstalled virtual private network (VPN) client to access the BT intranet,” illustrates Flavin. “Within 45 minutes, the system will have been updated with the relevant software.”
But this can be taken a step further, says Paul Roche, general manager, ebusiness solutions, at BT. A remote worker with a serious hardware problem can hand the machine over to a courier as he or she takes delivery of a replacement, and restore their previous environment online. “An agile worker can just log on with the newly delivered machine and in 20 minutes their environment will be identical to the one he or she has just logged out from.”
But by synchronising a user's data with a centrally stored copy, there are far greater advantages in support terms than just the ability to restore a PC to a former state. Above all, that centralisation frees the worker from being tied to any specific device.
“Users no longer have to worry about which device they're on, because all their work is held elsewhere,” says Roche. “They just access their data and applications over the Internet from whichever device they're using. In fact, many users don't even need a laptop to do that when they can log in from any computer in branch office or partner's office, or even in an Internet cafe, and get access to your desktop. In that sense, laptops today have more capabilities than people need.”
Handheld factors
With data and applications held centrally and accessed over the network, it becomes increasingly possible to equip certain users with a PDA or even a smart mobile phone as their primary interaction device.
But the support characteristics for such smaller, less standard 'form factors' is only being defined, says ITNet's Greenwood. “PDAs are simply less easy to manage,” he says.
For now, there are few if any remote desktop tools, so helpdesks have to talk users through problems 'blind', in the time-honoured manner. The lack of consistency between the devices that have been adopted by mobile workers is certainly not making that any easier - or less costly - to support.
Most companies are slow to supply them, says Greenwood, so people buy their own. But as PDAs have become an intrinsic tool for extended mobility, the organisation needs to offer support. “That means you have five or more different device types to support. There are also far more applications involved - it is like the early days of Windows, when users were running a whole host of different programs that eventually succumbed to consolidation. The corporate answer to this is to mandate the kinds of devices people can use and to allow very little individual software customisation.”
Those issues aside, the tools that enable the mobile workforce are maturing rapidly. As the software, the standards and the client devices evolve, and as bandwidth becomes less of an issue for wireless and occasionally connected users, the task of supporting the mobile and the fixed-location user will become one and the same.
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