John Rhome, Director of Information Services, AFL Telecommunications

Managing a Mobile Workforce

Mobile devices can make enterprises more productive, but they also introduce new risks

John Rhome, Ph.D., spends a lot of time on the road. His job as director of information services for AFL Telecommunications (a telecom product and service division of the Fujikura company based in Japan) keeps him busy. A frequent trip is from his office in Tennesee to Eagle Pass, Texas. "It's a three-hour trip, and I can work most of the way with mobile computing," Rhome says. Being mobile helps him squeeze time from what would be lost hours in airports, taxis, and hotel rooms. "When I get back to the office, I'm not overwhelmed by email," Rhome says. "I'm able to stay productive all day."

More and more CIOs and IT leaders like Rhome are supporting mobile workforces. Mobility enables efficiency, flexibility, and collaboration and can help improve employees' work-life balance. IT leaders, however, are understandably nervous because mobile computing also creates new vulnerabilities.

Mobile benefits

"Information is value. We're seeing more information being shared in real time," says Clif Triplett, CIO of Motorola's networks and enterprise business unit. "Data on individual PCs wasn't as easily shared as it is in a mobile environment."

Triplett sees other areas where mobile devices deliver bottom-line benefits, including supply-chain management, where data on suppliers, goals, costs, and quality is available to decision makers 24/7. Mobilizing the supply chain has proven to be a big win for Motorola; the company estimates that mobility has helped to improve its supply-chain productivity by 25 percent and made it the number one manufacturer in the 2006 InformationWeek 500 rankings for innovation in IT.

But mobility means more work for CIOs. Downtime grows even more costly, which means high-availability computing, data security, and business resilience become top priorities. "We try to be available 24/7, 365 days a year," Rhome says.

Mobile computing, Triplett says, is like "going back to the mainframe in a sense-you have a single corporate repository of data." That means mobilizing more than just email; it means management of customer relationships, human resources, financial applications, and other business-critical processes.

AFL Telecommunications, for example, maintains centralized Oracle-based business systems and makes them available to mobile employees over wireless networks such as Sprint's EV-DO.

Centralizing corporate data also helps with disaster preparedness. "The devices you have to protect are the gateway servers," Triplett says. "They're relatively small investments and can run reasonably independently, so if you put them in two different disaster zones, that's probably the cheapest way to maintain survivability of your business in a disaster."

"I live in Tennessee. Tornadoes like to come through here," Rhome says. "If I lose one of my offices through an act of nature, I can use my mobile devices and set up offices in homes, in garages, and in motels-and I can do that almost overnight."

Moving past obstacles

The inherent risks and challenges of employee mobility stem from both the devices and their connections. There's a greater risk of equipment loss or theft with a portable device. Data that travels wirelessly can also be intercepted in the air.

AFL employees get a standard configuration laptop, and Rhome uses Microsoft Active Directory tools built into Microsoft Windows to maintain those configurations. He avoids public Wi-Fi networks, opting instead to use Sprint's EV-DO connectivity whenever possible-he believes the additional expenses for connectivity and bandwidth are more than offset by the security a private network provides.