If it's a good day, Joe Nex won't have to deal face to face with any of the 240 field employees he works with at Terasen Gas.
"I only see them here when they've got an issue with the technology," says Nex, an infrastructure support technician at the Vancouver-based gas distribution company. "Otherwise they're mobile from start to finish, and they don't need to come in."
It's a scenario that's becoming increasingly common. While IT departments used to focus almost exclusively on "fixed" systems such as desktop PCs and servers, companies are experiencing a mobile computing boom. Instead of tethering people to a desk, computing technology and network-based resources can now go with workers to where the work is.
London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group now classifies nearly 40 per cent of all workers in the U.S. and Canada as "mobile," meaning they routinely do at least 20 per cent of their "core business functions" remotely. International Data Corp., meanwhile, predicts the number of mobile workers will soar to more than 850 million worldwide in 2009 from 650 million last year.
Much of the growth is coming as the technology finds its way into the hands of non-executive staff. A Mobility Market Monitor report earlier this year found that executive-level workers now make up just one-third of the average corporate mobile staff at U.S. companies. The report said the percentage of firms with mobile administrative personnel is expected to rise sharply, from about 36 per cent today to about 46 per cent by the end of 2008.
Nex is at the forefront of this trend. He supports the technology for about 180 mobile workers who troubleshoot gas lines and emergencies throughout British Columbia as well as systems for another 60 general field supervisors.
"They download their work orders [to laptops] and upload completions," Nex said. "It's cut out all the paperwork and gives us real-time data on where the resources are and what they're doing. They are so much more productive."
The concept of gas workers toting state-of-the-art laptops and handheld computers would have been unthinkable not long ago. But Nex says it's the beginning of a mobile IT revolution that's affecting workers in diverse jobs light years removed from the original power-suited road warriors.
Ken Dulaney, vice-president and an analyst at Gartner Research, says companies need to think of the supply chaintaking raw materials, transforming them and getting them to clients quicklywhen evaluating the productivity benefits of mobile technology.
"Almost everyone agrees on the benefits of faster supply chains," he says. "Underneath that supply chain is an information chain. That information chain must also be continuous if it is to support a continuous supply chain. But often that information chain is broken when users are in the field. To streamline the information chain, mobile technologies are required."
Indeed, a study by Cisco Systems Inc. and economist OMNI Consulting Group LLP found that the use of mobile data services increased global workforce productivity by an average of 13.4 per cent per week for a full-time worker. OMNI highlighted a number of examples from its research:
Insurance field claims adjusters handling an additional 7.4 claims per worker per week and improving payout ratios by an annual yield of 6.4 per cent per adjuster using mobile devices and wireless networks.
The use of RFID wireless technology in the manufacturing and logistics industries eliminating 5.9 per cent of logistics errors for any given warehouse operation.
Health care and pharmaceutical field sales representatives conducting an additional 8.3 physician briefings per week when given mobile data and voice access.
