One step beyond

Henrik Kummel, Business Development Manager for Sybase EMEA, discusses the emergence of the unwired workplace and its implications for tomorrow.

There have been numerous studies to prove the mobility business-case for enterprises. For example, there was the case of Britannia Airways measuring solid ROI simply by the difference in fuel costs from having to carry less hardcopies of rules and regulations!

This ongoing mobilisation will eradicate the kind of scenes shown in Terry Gilliam’s brilliant 1985 movie ‘Brazil’, which depicted a dismal parallel future where a field technician is unable to carry out a particularly critical intervention because he lacks the ‘27 B-6’ form. Today’s mobilised enterprise would enable that field technician to handle any such obstacle on-the-spot using just his mobile device.

However, the innovation frontier of mobility is not only one of pure process optimisation. As Tom Reitz, Manager of Service Business Proximity at KONE, one of the leading elevator maintenance companies in the world today, puts it, field technicians “should be able to take initiatives.” This provides an excellent illustration of how mobile innovation not only extends existing business processes, but actually enables completely new ones. In Reitz’s case, it is repairs and other unplanned activities, but there are many similar cases.

At the same time, mobile devices are evolving and becoming ubiquitous. Today, both the field technician and the executive carry a mobile extension of the enterprise. While the field-service and salesforce have been precursors in mobility, now all employees will be experiencing the productivity-enhancement through mobilisation of not just e-mail but also many others essential business-operations. Top executives see immediate value in having all the key performance indicators for which they carry responsibility (or for which they negotiate service level agreements) at their fingertips to be able to respond to challenges when and wherever they come. As a result, the whole operation –indeed the whole enterprise – evolves towards increased agility.

It is not only the customer-facing operations of the enterprise that are the target of today’s mobility projects. Surprising to some, we see a rising trend toward mobilisation of HR operations – not only in that we mobilise the people of the HR department itself, but more importantly by allowing all levels of management (team-leaders to department-heads) to transact with HR operations and approve their employees requests for leave, for transport-expenses etc., while on the go!

The challenge is extending these types of business processes, which typically reside on legacy ERP or Workflow systems onto the many different device-types used by employees, while not compromising enterprise security.

In planning the unwired enterprise, we need to avoid some common pitfalls borne of a set of misconceptions:

• Mobility is a brand-new application
• All mobile users will be using one device-type
• Connectivity will be ubiquitous and always available
• Develop a solution first and handle security later

The brand-new application

For many companies, the initial approach was to build an application on a specific device-type and deploy this to the users. The problem they then face is how to integrate that mobile application with the existing operational processes of the enterprise. This can become a bigger task than developing the application in the first place.

What is now being recognised as the best practice is to focus on the existing applications and processes of the enterprise and to extend these for mobile access. The mobile solution is then a composite application, built on top of mobilised application elements materialising the mobile extensions of legacy applications. This different paradigm for growing mobility is not only a good guarantee of operational success for the mobile application but also an extensible solution – adding other applications, extending other legacy applications becomes much easier with this approach – more like a mobile portal.

One device-type

Also in the initial approach, the theory is often that the enterprise can be built for just one mobile device-type and form-factor. This, however, proves itself to be false. While the applications for field-technicians often require larger devices with extensions to RFID readers, GPS, etc, most executives and sales-people will prefer smaller devices. Today, a large number of business phone users pick their own device. While some control and restrictions must be dictated if only for cost and security reasons, limiting the application support to only one device can be a cause for user-rejection. The best option when choosing the software platform is to select one that allows development from the middleware, rather from the device-side, and which supports the majority of popular mobile device platforms – from Symbian thru Blackberry to Pocket-PC.

Connectivity is ubiquitous

This assumption will encourage some to consider the best approach to be one where the development is all web-based and where the only requirement from the device is an embedded browser, which can present content and allow the user to transact with the applications. This is true for some mobile projects such as the Dubai eGovernment (http://mobile.dubai.ae) or the “Bank In Your Pocket” in the UK.

However for many applications, this is not enough. Even for email, the success of Blackberry is also explained by the emails being persisted to the memory of the device so the users can continue to read and respond to emails when at 30000 feet in an airplane. Other environments where communication links are impossible or banned include healthcare environments such as hospitals or as in the case of KONE: the bottom of an elevator shaft! While wireless data networks are becoming ubiquitous, the business-users will need application interaction with immediate response-times that can only be assured by mobile applications actually on the device and with asynchronous sync of the enterprise transactions.

To ensure the best user-experience, the end-users having used the application should not have to manage the synchronization, this should be done seamlessly by the application-middleware in the background. Same when new or updated data is being pushed out from the server-side. However, in some cases the sync of new data may require a notification to the user.

Thus in the case of KONE, the field-technicians using the application built on the middleware of Sybase Unwired Accelerator, when receiving a new urgent action-request, pushed from the server, are alerted by the device beeping and the application displaying the incoming ticket.

Security first, not later

With the application on the device and the data of that application being persisted, the problem of security must be solved. We must also bear in mind the statistic of “15% of users have lost a mobile phone”…

A good illustration of the need for device security hit the headlines with the laptop theft at Fidelity which exposed HR data on 196,000 HP workers.

(http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/laptops/story/0,10801,109816,00.html)

Encryption of the persisted data is a good first approach and selecting a technology that does this by default is important.

Three complementary approaches exist towards protecting the enterprise throughout the growth of mobile infrastructures:

1. Datastore encryption
2. Secure communication links
3. Securing the devices

For a comprehensive solution all servers as well as all the mobile devices – from smart-phones to laptops must be secured.

Another facet however is the data which users may choose independently to store on the device outside of the control of the specific mobilized application as when putting documents, spreadsheets and presentations on a mobile device as in the case of Fidelity’s laptop. To protect the devices globally, Sybase provides the infrastructure tool Afaria which contains a complete feature set for securing the edge – from encryption to sending stolen or lost devices a death-pill over the air which makes the phone or laptop wipe itself of all data.

And don’t forget the servers

While we build for the new paradigm, the openness of the systems also have the effect of moving enterprise data closer to the edge – to the point of action and new channels are being opened and extended.

One the server-side, the Sybase enterprise databases (Adaptive Server Enterprise) provides an encryption option whereby administrators can protect data without having to reengineer existing applications, effectively securing not only the database but also all of the backup tapes and disk drives associated.