Managing the Mobile Enterprise
Enterprise Integration—Decades of regulation encouraged a culture that built a legacy of isolated systems, each designed to serve the needs of a single department. Utilities are looking to drive business benefits from solutions that integrate their business processes. Utilities expect vendors to provide interoperable solutions that leverage industry standards to deliver an open architecture. The ability for a solution to “plug and play” with other solutions is essential to supporting enterprise workflow management. This means that solutions must understand their position in the enterprise and deliver distinct value.
Universal Technician—Utilities are restructuring their mobile workforces from separate specialized teams, each tasked with a narrowly focused set of work activities, to a more generalist approach. Mobile workers are cross-trained in a wider variety of skills and can be assigned to a greater range of work activities as the need arises. This means that solutions must be adaptable to support daily adjustments to work practices and workforce responsibilities while supporting the changing, personalized information needs of each user.
Mobile Office—Utilities are moving from niche wireless applications to broad use of mobile applications throughout their enterprises. Mobile applications are seen as core elements of improving efficiency and maintaining a competitive edge. Increased awareness and utilization of mobile technology is driving utilities to provide mobile access to more workers for more uses. Utilities that have realized the benefits of workforce management in their service organizations want to enable other parts of their organization. Utilities expect solutions to support the mobility needs of users with different work practices and business cases for mobile computing. In particular, this means that solutions must support a wide variety of mobile computers and handheld devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones, and two-way pagers.
Key Technology Trends
Business trends are driving demand for the benefits of enterprise workforce management. However, it is technology trends that are changing how these benefits are delivered.
Proliferation of Mobile Platforms—Diverse, low cost mobile computing platforms are enabling the business case for mobility. The choice of mobile platform has expanded from rugged PCs to include a wide variety of mobile devices meeting the needs of different types of mobile users: Windows CE handhelds, two-way pagers, PDAs, and mobile phones. It is now cost effective to provide all mobile workers with access to corporate information and applications.
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