Infosys-Oracle Blog

Most enterprises have already taken the first steps towards employee mobility and have seen quantitative improvement in employee productivity and business coverage. Deploying role specific enterprise applications over the mobile network will, however, turn out to be the game changing differentiator in many industry verticals.

The basic productivity improvement tools are access to e-mail, calendar and contact information over mobile devices. New generation mobile handsets (devices) have erased the demarcation between traditional thick client systems (desktops/laptops) and mobile thin client computing devices for accessing enterprise applications.

What is needed is a well designed package of software to optimally exploit the potential of these technologies. Organizations will gain an "unfair competitive advantage" when they begin to fully harness the capability of the mobile smart devices by deploying enterprise applications and tools that enable mobile workers to work from wherever they are, whenever they want to. In order to get there, organizations need to strategically define how to integrate mobility into their business processes and enterprise applications for successful business transformation.

The wireless and mobile strategies need to be supported by a strong set of operation policies. These together should lay down the rules regarding the users that need to be mobile, technologies (networks) to be deployed, devices to be supported and applications to deploy over the mobile network. I will discuss about these in details in another edition.

In my opinion a mobility enabled organization adopts these configurations:

1. Secured VPN for accessing the network from outside the office.
2. Wireless Network (WiFi) within the office. Wi-Fi enabled laptops provided to key employees, so they are able to access the Internet/Intranet from anywhere within the Office Building.
3. Smart Phones/PDAs provided to
   a.   Sales Force/ Geographically dispersed employees who need not come into the office to access the Office Network.
   b.   Senior managers so that emails can be checked and responded to during meetings without having to lug around heavy laptops and or burdening Wi-Fi networks.
4. Role specific mobile applications rolled out to Smart Mobile Devices which provide a significant productivity boost and competitive advantage to the organization.

Ultimately mobilizing existing enterprise applications or developing mobility enabled applications will enable organizations to

• Increase the productivity of the workforce
• Provide information on the move to business participants
• Allow faster and more efficient decision making
• Reduce unproductive travel time
• Improve logistics management

For more details on the Stages of Enterprise Mobility and implementation steps - please see the article "Mobilizing the Enterprise- Strategies and Technologies to Drive Organizational Readiness".