“You mean, you have to go to office to work? ”
The way things are moving, pretty soon, people who go to office to work
might be given funny looks by everyone, just as you would give to people who
don't have an email id or mobile phone today.
The concept of working from home or from anywhere is nothing new, but recent
developments in mobile computing have brought a twist in the tale. The first
change has been brought by the onslaught of high-speed data cards. As Internet
applications have become more bandwidth hungry, and most emails today come with
huge attachments, your existing data card's bandwidth is just not sufficient to
handle the extra load. Even if you're able to manage some how now, what will
happen as you move to richer forms of remote collaboration, which use audio as
well as video formats?
That brings us to the second major development that's reshaping mobile
computing-the web. Increasingly, organizations are using the web for doing more
than setting up portals. Cloud computing needs no introduction to anyone, nor do
the various online collaboration platforms that allow you to hold meetings
between teams dispersed across different geographic locations.
All of this would require additional bandwidth. So you would not only need to
worry about choosing the right high-speed data cards for your employees, but
also about choosing the right cloud computing platform and the right online
collaboration suite.
Things don't just end here. The third piece that completes the mobility
jigsaw is the mobile platform. You can't give laptops to all your employees, but
can you somehow leverage the smartphones they've all started to carry these
days? Can your employees at least check their emails from their smartphones,
besides using the plethora of other business applications that are available on
most mobile platforms today? Most of the popular mobile platforms are gearing up
to support more enterprise applications.
Laptops or netbooks with high-speed data cards, the rich web and mobile
platforms are re-defining the way employees work for their organizations. They
form a killer combination that might actually make the concept of going to
office to work look archaic.
There would be many of you who would by now have started worrying about the
social implications of enabling working from anywhere. We're comfortable
watching employees come to office and work in front of our eyes, and a change in
that will cause discomfort. Yes, there would be social issues, lifestyles would
change, and they have to be managed.
That's why in this story, we bring you the complete picture of the new
technologies that are re-defining how employees can work from anywhere. We'll
help you choose the right high-speed data cards, online collaboration suites,
and mobile platforms. Plus, we also look at the social issues involved in making
the change, followed by some successful examples of how different organizations
have mobilized their field force and what kinds of benefits they're reaping from
it.
Anil Chopra, Rahul Sah, Sandeep Koul, Madhur Chawla and Nidhi Sharma