Government Zest for Mobile Computing Grows
With snow on the ground and the wind chill factor below zero in much of the United States this time of year, mobile computing is sounding like a very good idea.
? By John Makulowich
With snow on the ground and the wind chill factor below zero in much of the United States this time of year, mobile computing is sounding like a very good idea.
Who would not want to work from some remote, sun-drenched location ? the places you see pictured on travel posters ? talking with colleagues by videoconference over the Internet? Or even inside your own cozy home, tapping out memos or writing code on your government-supplied laptop?
This fantasy, shared by many technically savvy knowledge workers in and outside government, raises a host of sensitive issues that managers and senior executives are going to face more in the years to come.
One of the early adopters of telecommuting, back in 1992, was none other than IBM Corp. Among major companies, it probably has one of the most mobile work forces in the world. Now it is using the lessons it learned over the years to guide clients seeking to follow that winding and unsure path.
For the unsuspecting executive seeking to go mobile, Debbie Dell takes a multilevel approach. The national competency manager of mobile and wireless services for IBM Global Services, operating from Boca Raton, Fla., divides her business world into companies that IBM helps from day one and those where a fix is required.
"In either case, the customer comes to us with the view that mobility is a way of re-engineering their business. Our first step as consultants is to focus on the key question: What is your purpose in going mobile? From a business standpoint, what exactly are your trying to accomplish?" Dell said.
Asked to define the term, Dell said mobility is more than the remote office. It amounts to nothing less than the ability to work or achieve productivity anyplace, anywhere, any time. That includes the programmer, the sales person, the worker in field service, the professional and even Dell herself, working from home in market development.
She said a company starting from ground zero is easier to work with than one trying to repair a bungled mobility effort. One reason is that mobile computing is part of a total solution that includes e-commerce and e-business ? not just a task to be attached to the organization with the management equivalent of duct tape.
It is not surprising that many companies are coming to Dell now after seeing some of the gains, both in revenue and stock price, made during the holiday season by firms like Amazon.com. It serves as the paradigm e-business and e-commerce company with books and CDs for sale online and with its one-click ordering.
But there is another dimension to mobile computing, one that raises a number of questions that beg clear answers. For example, one side of re-engineering to accommodate e-commerce, an increasing demand of the mobile work force, is dealing with the magnitude of tracking customers and shipments and of deploying hardware to support that effort.
"Many of the questions raised about mobile computing depend on the level of mobility," Dell said. "There is desktop to laptop, where you give staff the ability to work in different places and occasionally at home. However, if you deploy many of your workers to their homes, that has technical, personnel and legal impacts.
"Whatever the level, though, there is no question that we are going to continue to see an increase in telecommuting," Dell said.
A major lesson IBM learned over the years, according to Dell, is that the mobility concept drives many other changes. Among the questions that executives are asking Dell, No. 1 centers on human resources, on the need to develop policies that address such issues as compensation, work hours and availability.
"That issue may finally come down to determining where the break or boundary is between work and home," Dell said.
"A second concern of executives is technical standards, of what technology solution to commit to, what testing has been done and where the product stands in rollout," she said. "Everyone wants to avoid the solution that does a disappearing act in 12 or 18 months.
"The third big concern is financial [return on investment] and the total cost of ownership," said Dell.
Lior Haramaty is one executive who knows the importance of product development and staying power as well as technical standards. He is co-founder of VocalTec Communications Ltd., in Herzliya, Israel, and vice president of technical marketing.
In February 1995, his company was the first to introduce a consumer product for IP telephony, Internet Phone, allowing the mobile user to place calls over the packet-switching network of the Internet.
That product, now in version Internet Phone 5, evolved from efforts that stretch back to 1988 with a voice over networks prototype, moving from local-area network through wide-area network to IP.
The company's product line lets users send audio, video, data, text and collaborative communications between personal computers and other devices over IP networks like the Internet and intranets.
"At first, the phone companies saw our Internet Phone as a toy," Haramaty said. "Later they viewed it as a threat. Now they see it as an opportunity. The current buzzword shows how far we have come: Voice is the data. Why try and transfer data over voice lines when you can transfer naturally over data networks?"
In mid-December, VocalTec announced that six companies, along with ITXC Corp. and Lucent Technologies, will support the iNOW! (interoperability NOW!) Profile set to be published this month. iNOW! is a standards-based, multivendor effort that will ease interoperability among IP telephony platforms.
The six companies include major industry stakeholders, such as Cisco Systems Inc., Ascend, Clarent, Dialogic, Natural MicroSystems and Siemens.
All of these firms will work with the iNOW! Profile to make their gateways and gatekeepers interoperate with each other's products and with those from Lucent and VocalTec.
The benefit of the initiative is that carriers and callers will no longer be limited to where they can call.
In the past, calls had to end on the same platform from which they began, and Internet telephony service providers (ITSP) were forced to choose between relying on a single vendor or operating several networks of incompatible gateways.
Lior Haramaty
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