Managing mobility

Living in the age of mobility was supposed to make our lives easier and more flexible, but even with technology advances, running a mobile workforce creates a specific set of challenges for field service managers.

In the field service sector, there’s no shortage of informational reports on current and future trends, particularly where technology is concerned. While it may have taken business a while to catch up with consumer adoption rates in terms of mobility and portable devices, the BYOD dust has settled and there’s seemingly no going back now... and that’s just the start.

Most companies in the service sector are looking for the same returns on mobility investment: improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs and increased productivity - no surprises there. The problem is that it can be difficult to pre-empt future mobile requirements and even harder to weigh up alternatives.

Earlier this year, Gartner Inc released a research paper titled ‘Top 10 mobile technologies and capabilities for 2015 and 2016’. The report hypothesises that for organisations to realise the full potential of mobility, there is a wide range of skills and technologies that need to be mastered, many of which are potentially not even on the IT radar. The paper is primarily directed at developers of mobile solution elements including apps and websites, but it contains information that should be of interest to anyone deploying a field service team with respect to what the future holds.

Wear and tear

Unsurprisingly, wearable devices are still on the radar. For all the talk though, development of wearable technology is still reasonably limited. This could be due to the fact that no-one is entirely sure what purpose it serves, particularly from a business perspective. Thus far, realisation of the technology has been limited to areas such as fitness and health care - look no further than the take-up of the wildly popular FitBit device - as well as a few less-than-stellar forays into what is termed ‘ubiquitous computing’, which includes the likes of Google Glass. Sales of that particular display were halted earlier this year, which Google asserts was to free up development teams to focus on future versions, rather than outright abandonment of the concept.

Regardless of the state of play today, the wearables sector is expected to be worth billions by 2016 as more devices make their way to market. According to Gartner, the smartphone will become the hub of a personal area network (PAN), which will consist of on-body healthcare sensors, smart jewellery and watches, display devices and clothing-embedded sensors. So far, none of this seems terribly relevant to business, but it is likely that organisations will utilise such functionality to monitor and communicate with staff, and as a channel for ensuring health and safety. On the other side of the coin will be the increase in privacy and security issues that arise from adoption of this technology.

Wi-Fi wins out

New Wi-Fi standards are on the short-term horizon. 802.11ac, 11ad, 11aq and 11ah will deliver increased performance and vastly improve applications such as telemetry. The move from congested cellular networks to Wi-Fi has been steadily on the rise over the last few years, as evidenced by the increasing number of publicly available Wi-Fi hotspots.

Gartner suggests that demand on Wi-Fi infrastructure will increase substantially in the next few years as more enabled devices appear in organisations and as applications that rely on location sensing require denser placement of access points. Ultimately, improvements in Wi-Fi technology may make life on the road a little easier, but will also impact on businesses with Wi-Fi networks as infrastructure is likely to require an upgrade or complete replacement.

Mobile management

Back to the Gartner report, and there is a distinct emphasis on enterprise mobile management (EMM), which is the convergence of a number of current management, security and support technologies including: mobile device management (MDM), mobile application management (MAM), application wrapping and containerisation, and some elements of enterprise file synchronisation and sharing (EFSS). The research experts suggest that convergence in this market will see a dramatic decrease in the number of vendors offering management and security tools. With this in mind, they recommend treating purchases in the EMM arena as a two-year tactical decision.

Connected cars

Cars and phones have not exactly shared a trouble-free history. Studies suggest that many emerging safety features developed by the automotive industry have been effectively hindered by the presence of phones in vehicles. We humans are easy to distract and our insatiable desire to stay connected has caused more than a bingle or two since the arrival of the mobile phone.

Nevertheless, car connectivity is a burgeoning industry. Some high-end car manufacturers have already released limited functionality in their vehicles, but now the likes of Apple and Google are poised to get their respective offerings into the Australian market.

Apple aims to release CarPlay locally this year, over 12 months after the official unveiling. Google followed up in June last year with an announcement of its own offering, Android Auto. Needless to say, they are not interchangeable, but there is overlap in partnerships with car manufacturers and electronics vendors.

The focus for this technology is voice control, although there are other operational options available, depending on existing hardware such as in-built touch screens and buttons, or the available aftermarket kits that accompany the technology.

Car connectivity is being touted as a safer alternative for mobile phone use. Users will have the ability to send and receive text messages via voice commands, among other things, and manufacturers assert that there is inherently less danger because it’s a case of ‘hands on the wheel and eyes on the road’. Detractors of the technology argue that the use of cognitive skills required to perform voice-to-text commands causes significant distraction. No doubt there will be consideration towards limited use legislation at some future point. Nevertheless, research company IHS Automotive predicts that 68 million vehicles worldwide will have voice control capability by 2020.

A moving feast

The sands will keep shifting as new technology is released. When devising a mobility strategy, don’t get caught up in the next best thing and forget the original aim; if it doesn’t increase productivity, reduce costs or empower your team to service customers, do you really need it at all?

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