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Challenges in Mobile Workforce Mgmt

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

IT has made it possible for today's enterprise workforce to become

increasingly mobile. The term, 'Anywhere Office' is a reality now. Whether it is

a senior executive or a sales personnel, everybody is working on the go now. The

office-bound employees are decreasing as most of them are able to connect to the

information they require for their daily work productivity on notebooks or

mobile phones, thanks to the all pervasive Internet connectivity. With the

advent of wireless communication, the employee is not bound to his office

premises for work; instead he can deliver his work from anywhere. A worker can

work from locations that were never thought of before, like airport lounges,

coffee shops, hotels and even while commuting by train or a car. Thus, helping

the employee to be more productive.

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According to an IDC report, across the world 30.4% of the workforce will be

mobile in 2011. With mobile workforce expected to account for more than a

quarter of the world's population, IT has been a great enabler for that, but

along with the benefits that an organization can have from mobile workforce

there are issues and challenges that are critical to be resolved to achieve

success. At the recently concluded PCQuest Infrastructure SummIT 2009, mobile

workforce management was one of the sessions that was taken up by the prolific

speaker Nina Godbole. She has authored books on Information Security Management

and Software Quality Assurance. At her session on mobile workforce management

she talked about key issues and challenges that come with it.



"Mobility is not just about technology, it is about choosing the right

applications for the right people, to be deployed in a mobile and a remote

manner. If that happens I am sure it will increase and support the

productivity and open the opportunity for many unprecedented things that we

have ever thought about. "

Ms

Nina Godbole
, Independent Researcher

Mobile Workforce isn't new



The workforce has always been mobile, for instance the sales personnel had to be
out of office to meet vendors and prospective customers. What has changed now is

that now field workers can use handheld devices to get access to business

information held on back-end databases of their organizations. Thus there is

need to deal with the requirements of such employees who are always on the move

and need access to an organization's business information. The employees would

be using their notebooks or smart phones to access the organization's

information. If employees lose their devices then such sensitive information can

be compromised. Therefore IT managers of the organizations have to consider

automated tools that provide proactive monitoring and desktop management

capabilities to ensure compliance with IT policies. Also, organizations have to

implement stringent IT governance, regulatory compliances and security policies

to ensure that their information assets are safe beyond their premises.

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Enabling a mobile workforce



There isn't any other industry that has seen such tremendous growth as witnessed
by the Indian telecom industry. Fuelled by increasing mobile networks providing

wireless Internet connectivity, and also with notebooks becoming affordable, the

Indian workforce is also morphing into a mobile workforce. Organizations are

setting up their VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to enable their employees to

work from remote locations. Handheld devices like PDAs and smart phones are also

becoming more powerful, and replacing notebook usage for most of the work. As

government is also releasing wireless spectrums for technologies like 3G, this

will also help in enabling mobile workforce.

Its not just technology that has been the driver for employee mobility, but

also the factors of globalization and changing nature of work. Organizations are

implementing policies wherein they ensure that the employee does not have to

spend most of his time at work away from his family, hence providing a work-life

balance, which in turn has also been a reason for organizations for enabling

employee mobility.

Challenges faced



Managing mobile employees also termed as untethered workers creates some
difficult challenges for an organization. The foremost of them being the

information security issue. With so much of information flying around beyond the

organizational premises, how can one secure the information? Another issue that

organizations face is of keeping tabs on all the wandering devices that are

being used by the mobile workers. Also integration of personal mobile phones and

employees' home WLANs with organizations firewalls is also a technical

challenge. Not only the firewall integration, but also application integration;

for instance, will the PDA be able to accept communication from a particular

business application. Such issues are common while an organization opts for

enabling a mobile workforce.

Since, security is the primary concern; organizations should enforce password

policies at the device level. The user authentication should always be through

SSL to ensure secure communication. And software like remote management can

track and monitor policies of notebooks as well as some compatible smart phones.





In case the user misplaces the device, such software allow the IT manager to
destroy the information stored in the device or make the device unusable. Also,

the device can be traced, thus limiting the possibility of any misuse of the

organization's information through that lost device.

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