this supplement is an independent publication from raconteur … · 2019-06-18 · orative tools,...

Transform the way you work

24084_VF_Banner_TimesAd_60x264_AW_v2.indd 1 17/9/10 13:38:27

This supplement is an independent publication from Raconteur Media

September 21, 2010

twitter.com/raconteurmedia

21STCENTURYWORKFORCENew ways of working

© fS

top

/ A

lam

y

Little Chef reduced IT support costs by £700,000 with our fixed and mobile solutionvodafone.co.uk/totalcomms

24084_VF_LittleChef_TimesAd_338x264_AW_v1.indd 1 17/9/10 09:36:45

21ST CENTURY WORKFORCE 3

In a time of economic uncer-tainty, when the need for great-er cost control and efficiency has never been greater, the

question for business leaders is not whether they should consider flex-ible mobile working, but whether they can afford not to?

As this report seeks to demon-strate, there are many, varied ar-guments for the introduction of mobile working - but it seems that many companies have yet to take advantage of the opportunities for greater productivity and increased employee satisfaction that it offers.

According to a recent pan-Euro-pean study undertaken by Vodafone Global Enterprise - the Vodafone business that manages the telecoms needs of multinational enterprise customers - only two fifths (41 per cent) of the 500 multinationals sur-veyed said they had a comprehensive mobile working solution in place, although a further 44 per cent said it was an important priority. One of the key barriers to introduction, respondents commented, was the impact that flexible, mobile working would have on corporate culture.

There’s no doubt that this impact can be substantial - but business leaders need to challenge their as-sumptions about mobile working, according to Nicholas McQuire, re-search director at IT market research company IDC: “The benefits of mo-bile working and home-working in particular are becoming clearer to businesses,” he says. “Although there are some perceived obstacles, the benefits around cost reduction, enhanced productivity, more robust business continuity plans and im-proved sustainability and compli-ance are helping organisations to

overcome any doubts and offer em-ployees greater flexibility in terms of where they choose to work.”

That final point is important, be-cause by and large, employees have moved beyond their initial concerns that mobile phones, mobile email and other mobility enablers act as ‘golden handcuffs’, permitting their employers to extend the working day to all waking hours.

Where implemented well, it’s now widely recognised that flexible mobile working allows for greater efficiency and better balancing of work and personal life - to the ben-efit of bosses and workers alike. It’s a win-win for both groups, say mo-bility experts, and could quickly be-come a key factor in enabling smart companies to attract and retain high-calibre talent (see article, The flexible workforce, page 4).

To get the full benefits of mobility, however, companies need to look be-yond the basic functions of voice calls and text messages and start exploring the extended capabilities of today’s mobile devices. A whole world of mobile applications is opening up, giving employees access to a wealth of corporate information and collab-orative tools, regardless of whether they’re working at home, at a cus-tomer’s premises or out in the field. Using these, they can be more re-sponsive to customer needs and their employers can more easily adapt to changing demand patterns and fluc-tuating market conditions (see arti-cle, The portable office, page 6).

In Vodafone’s survey, pricing predictability was cited as a key concern by respondents. Many highlighted fears that differing tar-iff structures across different mar-kets would prove complex to man-

age - but in fact, today’s provider offerings tackle the issue head-on. Per-seat pricing, for example, can provide complete transparency and budgeting predictability across countries and continents.

In any case, a more sophisticated view of the cost and return on in-vestment offered by mobile work-ing is required, say experts; one that takes into account the financial im-pact of reducing corporate real es-tate, infrastructure costs and busi-ness travel, and the resulting tax implications of these efficiencies (see article, Cost control, page 8).

“While flexible working will ne-cessitate an investment in IT and communications, these costs look far more reasonable when you com-pare them with the cost of provid-ing a company desk, replacing and retaining lost staff and the other sav-ings that can be achieved through rationalising corporate infrastruc-ture and reducing business travel and absenteeism,” comments Guy Laurence, CEO of Vodafone UK.

Security concerns, meanwhile, are equally addressable. Today’s device management tools, for ex-ample, enable IT departments to remotely apply controls that ensure corporate security is maintained across the board, even to handsets on the other side of the globe.

That’s important, because an or-ganisation needs to protect the mo-bile device itself, the access route back into the corporate network, any data that may be stored on the device, or transmitted between the device and corporate systems. Today, however, a wide range of tools and strategies exist that can ensure that the security of such information is just as good as the security provided to non-wireless uses, and in many cases, better (see article, Securing the mobile business, page 12).

Reducing environmental impact is another important knock-on benefit of flexible mobile working.

In an age when companies of all sizes are seeking to meet more ex-acting sustainability targets, it can result in employees taking far fewer trips by car, train or plane and ma-jor reductions in the heating, light-ing and power consumed by corpo-rate premises (see article, The green perspective, page 11).

In these ways, mobile working can help companies to prepare for future regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions and enable them to meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) objectives that support their brand and instil investor confidence.

Finally, today’s mobile technology holds out the hope of freeing up em-ployee time to focus on more strate-gic activities. Machine-to-machine capabilities are increasingly enabling machines, monitors and meters to automatically report on their status, convey data to other devices and re-ceive instructions remotely, automat-ing a wide variety of mundane data collection and reporting tasks (see article, Talking machines, page 14).

One thing is clear, however: flexible mobile working takes trust. In order to establish a successful flexible work cul-ture, it is essential to ensure that both bosses and workers employees under-stand and work within an environ-ment of mutual trust and obligation.

Processes and policies need to be put in place to ensure work and performance standards are moni-tored and maintained. Lines of communication must be kept open and staff must have regular, face-to-face contact with managers and colleagues. And flexible working should never mean ‘always work-ing’ – employees must feel that it is acceptable to turn their device off.

Trust, in fact, may be the most significant obstacle of all - but the rewards for companies that are able to overcome it are great: by making the jump to flexible work-ing now, they won’t be storing up bigger challenges for the future, when traditional work models no longer support the levels of flex-ibility, adaptability and commu-nication that the competitive busi-ness environment demands.

INSIDE

EditorJessica Twentyman

Contributors Ron Condon, John Lamb, Nick Martindale, Rod Newing, Sally Whittle

PublisherDanielle Maidana-Power

Production manager Fabiana Abreu

DesignHervé Boinay

For more information about Raconteur Media publications in The Times and The Sunday Times, please contact Dominic Rodgers T: 020 7033 2106 E: [email protected] W: www.raconteurmedia.co.uktwitter.com/raconteurmedia

The information contained in this publication has been obtained from sources the proprietors believe to be correct. However, no legal liability can be accepted for any errors. No part of this publication may be reproduced without the prior consent of the Publisher.© RACONTEUR MEDIA

3 Flexible mobile working For today’s business leaders, the question is not whether they should introduce flexible mobile working, but whether they can afford not to

4 The flexible workforce Employees that give their workers more choice about where, when and how they work can expect to see a welcome uplift in productivity

6 The portable office Today’s corporate mobile phones aren’t just used to make calls and send texts. Increasingly, they provide employees with a window on a wealth of corporate information

8 Pinning down costs The benefits of mobile working are well established, but they will not be realised unless costs are carefully managed

10 The green perspective Environmental sustainability may not be the primary driver of mobile working initiatives, but it’s a welcome knock-on benefit

12 Securing the mobile workforce In a world where mobile devices can fall prey to loss or theft, smart companies safeguard mobile data rigourously. But they don’t let security stand in the way of user convenience

14 Talking machines Machine-to-machine (M2M) technology enable devices to communicate with each other, automating a wide variety of data collection tasks

Flexibility is key to today’s working culture

Flexible mobile workingovErvIEw It’s time for business leaders to challenge their assumptions about the barriers to mobile working, says Jessica Twentyman

It’s no secret that the world of work has changed immeas-urably in recent years. The ‘job for life’ is a thing of the

past and traditional nine-to-five roles are no longer the norm.

Recent economic turbulence has merely piled on the pressure for eve-ryone. Today’s employers must boost productivity and more accurately match workforce resources to the work that needs doing. Their em-ployees, meanwhile, are more pro-ductive and more committed when they can balance their working hours with their personal commitments.

Too frequently, the modern work-place is portrayed as a battleground, where conflicting interests lead to disharmony. But flexible working - enabled by the latest mobile tech-nologies - provides an answer that can keep all parties satisfied.

For bosses, having a flexible, mobile workforce enables them to boost productivity, respond to changing customer demand and cut the costs associated with over-resourcing. One-fifth of organisa-tions avoided redundancies during the recent recession by introducing flexible working practices, accord-ing to a study from employment research specialists, IRS Research. Two-thirds of employers from 162 organisations said that flexible working had helped them to cut costs, while a similar number said that it had helped to reduce the number of jobs lost.

For employees, flexible work-ing offers a way to juggle work and home and to perform more effi-ciently during the hours that they do work. This, in turn, results in “raised morale, motivation, com-mitment and engagement”, as well as “reduced absenteeism”, according to experts at the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD).

In a recent survey from recruitment company Hays, an overwhelming 85 per cent of employees surveyed said that, if their employer were to intro-duce more flexible working options, they would be more likely to stay with them. Almost all (95 per cent) believed that flexible working would improve their work-life balance and one-fifth now see such policies as “es-sential” when choosing a job.

As a result, flexible working offers a potential win-win opportunity for bosses and workers alike, says Guy Laurence, CEO of Vodafone UK, but making it work requires a shift in thinking by business leaders, he adds: “Some will say that the costs involved in offering employees ways to work flexibly using mobile tech-nologies are too steep - but that’s an old way of looking at things.”

The new way of working, by con-trast, demands a broader, more stra-tegic view that takes into account the wide-ranging benefits that flexible working offers; among them, reduc-ing corporate real estate, slashing business travel costs, meeting cor-porate sustainability targets.

“But, above all, it demands a major shift in attitudes, away from ‘presenteeism’, where an employer is assumed to be working simply because they’re sitting at a desk, to one where their value is measured by their output and where it’s rec-ognised that, in many cases, they’re more productive when they’re away from the office.”

ThE EmPlOYEE PERSPECTivEFor Jacqueline McHugh, a care coordinator with Glasgow Coun-ty Council, working life has be-come “a hundred times easier”

since ‘going mobile’. The moment she turns on her BlackBerry in the morning, she can see what home visits she and her team of care-workers need to make that day. She can see if an elderly client has been discharged from hospi-tal in the last 24 hours and what follow-up care is needed. While she makes visits, she has access to the client’s care plan, detailing what help they require. And if she doesn’t get an answer from a cli-ent when she goes to visit, contact details for their next of kin are instantly available on her handset. “It’s great, we can just get on with

our jobs and get things done for cli-ents straight away,” she says. “We’re not held up by having to call back to the office for details of what we’re supposed to be doing or where we’re supposed to be,” she says.

With flexible, mobile working, she’s free to concentrate on the as-pects of her job that she finds most rewarding: providing day-to-day care and support for the elderly.

For other employees, flexible working means the ability to work from home – a place where many feel they can actually be more pro-ductive, compared to a bustling of-fice environment. At Bolton Coun-cil, for example, many employees now work from their own homes on a regular basis, including mem-bers of the IT team.

“With our previous flexible solu-tion, locally installed applications weren’t available unless I was work-ing from the office,” says informa-tion systems analyst, Joanne Hulme. Since the Council implemented the Vodafone Secure Remote Access (VSRA) solution, however, she can securely and reliably access any ap-plication she requires.

Her colleague, Neil Smithies, an ICT business support officer, adds: “VSRA helps me to work produc-tively from home and complete tasks using centrally held data. I find the home environment is often less distracting, so I can concen-trate better.”

For Bolton Council, meanwhile, the project has resulted in a £76,000 per year saving on home broad-band connections and reduced the amount of office space needed by 25 per cent.

For some would-be employees, flexible mobile working isn’t just an enjoyable ‘perk’ – it’s an imperative, says Gillian Nissim, managing direc-tor of workingmums.co.uk. Her on-line recruitment business specialises in finding employment opportuni-ties for skilled professionals who want flexibility in their working lives in or-der to maximise the time they spend with their children. Mobile tech-nologies are essential to her and her team of fourteen employees, many of whom face the same challenges as the company’s job candidates in juggling their responsibilities.

“I couldn’t run this business without mobile technologies – my

4 21ST CENTURY WORKFORCE

The flexible workforce

Mobile working demands a major shift

in employer attitudes from ‘presenteeism’ to measuring by output

PoLICY Flexible working supported by mobile technologies makes for happier workers and happier bosses, too, argues Jessica Twentyman

A flexible and remote working plan enables companies to retain valued staff by offering them choices to suit their lifestyle demands, according to Ken Sheridan, co-founder of Re-mote Employment, an online site for flexible and remote working. It also gives employers the added advantage of recruiting talented in-dividuals from anywhere in the country instead of just around their local office, he adds.

With that in mind, Sheridan proposes an eight-step plan for implementing a flexible working plan:1. Establish the business case and the objec-tives of introducing such a scheme. Consider how increased flexibility could enhance work-ing practices across the company. 2. Ascertain goals and the action expected to reach those targets. Determine the issues that flexible working needs to address. 3. Communicate the concept to staff at an early stage to realise the positive impact on the busi-ness. Survey all employees to find what they would appreciate and value. Ensure this works both for the individual and the business. Personal flexibility will build a strong and loyal workforce.

4. Consult with human resources (HR) specialists to prepare relevant documents, such as a ‘Home Office Health and Safety Checklist’, to ensure you become a responsible employer of choice. 5. Talk to managers to analyse what jobs can be flexible within the organisation. Clear rules from the outset will avoid future confusion. Em-ployees with flexible working not only need to be managed, but evaluated and rewarded with career development. 6. If necessary, prepare an equipment budg-et for remote and home workers. Decide on the technology that will be required and how to secure data. Consult with IT providers to streamline solutions. 7. Set up an activity programme for remote workers to keep staff involved with team meet-ings, virtual conferences and home assess-ments. Keeping remote or home workers ‘vis-ible’ with support and resources will reduce absenteeism and improve productivity.8. Review the plan to monitor the effectiveness and productivity of flexible working. Once a flex-ible plan is in action it cannot be put to one side; it will constantly evolve and grow with the company.

how to implement a flexible working plan

© O

JO Im

ages

/Rex

Fea

ture

s

BlackBerry is my lifeline because I know that it can help me and my team get some really valuable work done whenever and wherever it suits us,” she says. “But as an em-ployer, I also know that it isn’t al-ways easy to find really good, ex-perienced and committed people. Offering a range of flexible working practices can really help secure the perfect employee.” Top employers such as banking giant Royal Bank of Scotland and The National Trust seem to agree with Nissim - both organisations use workingmums.co.uk to recruit staff and advertise flexible-working vacancies.

A CAREFUl PlANFor organisations that have yet to make the leap to more flexible, mobile working arrangements - or those that feel they could improve on what’s already offered to employ-ees - careful planning will be neces-sary, says Laurence of Vodafone.

“When we have a new customer, we work closely with them to assess

what they need, looking at roles, activities and circumstances of in-dividuals in their organisation,” he says. “This helps the human re-sources team and line-of-business staff that manage them not only to identify what tools each group with-in the workforce needs, but also de-cide how different groups should be managed, what additional support they might require and even set the level of productivity that should be expected from them.”

Surveys are a useful tool for look-ing at the different ways employees work, he adds. “By surveying a rep-resentative sample of employees, it’s possible to define groups or profiles according to where and how they work best - whether that’s in cor-porate offices, customers’ premises, out on the road or from their own home,” he says. That information can then be used to map out the commu-nication and information technolo-gies required to enable them to work “smarter, more productively and more flexibly,” he adds.

While some bosses still believe - for whatever reason - that flexible mo-bile working isn’t for them, Laurence warns, they can’t afford to ignore workplace demographics. A younger generation of employees is entering the workforce with very different ex-pectations from their predecessors.

“Kids coming out of university today have been brought up with all the flexibility that modern technol-ogies offer. They’re completely used to being able to access the internet wherever they are, and are adept at using this kind of technology in their day-to-day lives, long before they even start work,” he points out. “Ask them to sit in an office, behind an allocated desk, using old technologies, and they’ll just laugh. More to the point, they’ll ‘vote with their feet’ and go to work for anoth-er company that’s more forward-thinking about flexible working.”

With that in mind, flexible mo-bile working looks like becoming a key weapon in the ‘war for talent’ in the years to come.


A compelling case for flexible working

Many of the pressures felt by today’s business leaders can be solved, at least in part, by the introduction of flexible working, as the diagram below demonstrates

Flexibleworkingdrivers

Reducingbusiness

travel

Cost

Meeting theneeds of the

customer

Legislation

Environmentalsustainability

objectives

Recessionand intensified

competition

Culture

Mature andfast mobiletechnology

Employer ofchoice

Source: Vodafone

Always-on connectivity, wherever you’re working

The provider: Guy Laurence, CEo, vodafone UK“The days when Dad couldn’t make the schools sports day because he’s in meetings should be a thing of the past. It should be perfectly possible for him to jump onto his BlackBerry or laptop with mobile broadband once he gets home from the event and make up for the hours missed. Work/life balance requires give and take on both sides, but society is changing, and technology today is designed to accommodate those changes and assist the desire of employees to alter when and how they work. I don’t believe that this trend encourages a culture where we can’t switch off from work - it’s simply a matter of using common sense. Most people are learning to adjust to the availability of workplace information and there’s increasingly an evolving social etiquette around when you should expect your colleagues to be available. When it’s appropriate, smart employ-ees apply the ultimate sanction: the ‘off’ switch.”

The work/life specialist: wilson wong, The work Foundation“Mobile technology, by its ubiquity, permeates and fa-cilitates work. This year, we are approaching five billion mo-

bile phone subscriptions glo-bally, and by 2013, the number

of internet users is forecast to reach one and a half billion.

The biggest win is flex-ibility in work ar-

rangements and the potential ad-vantages of lower

costs – remote support, smaller office space, and so on. For these benefits to be realised, organi-sations need to regard employees as self-man-aging. However, our research shows that trust in employees remains an issue, often resulting in prescriptive ways of working and, in extreme situations, electronic surveillance.At the other end, mobile technology encour-ages a culture of 24/7 responsiveness. ‘Respon-sible’ employees find it difficult to resist the permeability of the professional private space; especially with home working and smart devic-es that permit seamless connectivity to HQ. An inability to ‘switch off’ can result in stress and affect both mental and physical health.The demand for and benefits of flexible working, facilitated by mobile technology, is clear. We shall see if technology becomes the servant or the master of the modern knowledge worker.”

The industry analyst: rob Bamforth, Quocirca“Mobile technologies have already radically changed many elements of working culture in the UK, and yet there is more to come as working processes and, in particular, manage-ment processes adapt to take more advantage of employee mobility. Already, we have seen communications shift from ‘location to loca-tion’ to ‘person to person’; no longer contact-ing companies or departments, but individuals and roles. Access to data has also become per-sonalised and mobile, delivered directly to the palm of the individual. The impact on business processes is that communication and informa-tion has moved directly to the moment and place of immediate need. This streamlines processes, pro-viding operational effi-ciency and should relieve stresses on the individ-ual – for example, no longer having to make arbitrary journeys back to the office or to and from other work locations.”

What is the impact of mobile technologies in the UK?

Mobile communications make a real difference to the way all kinds of workers operate - not

only by allowing them to be reached when they are out of the office (a benefit we all take for granted these days), but also by giving them access to data just as if they were sitting in front of a PC in their own offices.

A combination of technologies is driving this trend and accelerat-ing the rate of change. Today’s 3G mobile networks now span most of the country and offer high-speed delivery of data. Higher-speed 4G services are just around the corner. Widespread availability of WiFi hotspots also provides a perform-ance boost and lower costs.

At the same time, the rapid de-velopment of smart portable de-vices – including the BlackBerry, Apple iPhone and iPad, Android phones and other devices running Windows mobile or Symbian oper-ating systems – provide users with a small but powerful computing de-vice that is permanently connected and able to handle a bewildering new range of applications.

These phones can also take pho-tographs, and transmit them, and most of them have a geolocation function, so that users can pinpoint their position to within a few yards.

Stir all those ingredients to-gether and then add the collabo-rative ethos of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twit-ter, and you have the basis for a major revolution in the way we all work – not just white-collar knowledge workers, but also a whole range of mobile workers such as midwives, field service engineers and parcel couriers.

ClEAR ADvANTAgESDriving the widespread adop-tion of the new technologies are clear savings on time, paperwork, money, and even petrol. Take, for instance, police officers, who have long complained that, as ‘bobbies on the beat’, they are overbur-dened with paperwork and spend too much time form-filling back at the police station.

Now, several forces have begun issuing BlackBerrys to their offic-ers, allowing them to access police databases easily, report back on incidents, and to use the camera

to photograph graffiti, for exam-ple, and send the image back to central computers.

Another example is utility serv-ice contractor Morrison Utility Services, which is carrying out a nationwide refurbishment of mains services for the electricity, gas, telecoms and water indus-tries. Its managers have mainly iPhones, connected to an applica-tion built around the cloud-based service from Salesforce.com. The management system eliminates existing spreadsheets, paper proc-esses, and work management da-tabase systems with one unified, browser-based system.

The Morrison staff can use the shared, real-time view of op-erations to look up where mains repair contract jobs are located based on GPS co-ordinates, take photographs of the work and up-load them into Salesforce CRM, and report on completed projects. The company says it has slashed administration time, and has given much closer control over the progress at each of the 700 projects it is running.

The list goes on, and includes one-person businesses right up to multinational corporations, all of whom are managing to reduce costs and deliver a faster, better service.

Any company or organisation that fails to take advantage of some of these new capabilities is likely to lose business, says Peter Kelly, en-terprise director for Vodafone UK. “Customers expect instant service these days, so business is increasingly about real-time communications,” he says. “Historically a lot of the systems were not joined up. Customers would leave voicemails, emails, or send faxes or letters, and days would pass before they got an answer.”

He says the goal of any organi-sation should be to get the right information to the right person at the right time. In other words, instead of having to go back to the office to check the emails, access the customer contacts database, or log an order that has just been placed, the worker can do their job from where they happen to be – at home, in a motorway café or on the customer’s premises.

The key to making this happen falls under the umbrella term of ‘unified communications’, or UC,

which basically means bringing fixed, mobile and desktop com-munications together.

“Unified communications can bring the power of collaboration and team-working,” says Kelly. “Companies using older technolo-gies can become siloed, and in some cases, dysfunctional. People in the field find it hard to deal with people in headquarters.”

With the newer capabilities, it is easier to achieve cross-functional collaboration because people are easier to get hold of. “Compa-nies can become uncompetitive because it takes them too long to get the right people together to make decisions quickly,” he says. “The power of unified com-munications, such as Vodafone’s One and One Net UC solutions,

is to reduce the time to make de-cisions – whether to approve a commercial offering, to approve an investment or an appoint-ment. That is the power of uni-fied communications: you can be agile and collaborative. “

ThE UC bENEFiTAt the most basic level, UC gives you fewer cables to manage in the office, because voice calls travel over the office data network. That can bring down costs and make network management simpler.

It then delivers greater flex-ibility, because users can log on from any desk in the organisa-tion and the extension is theirs – remember how long it would take to move an extension with an old-style phone system? Flex-

ible ‘hot-desking’ is already al-lowing companies to reduce the amount of office space they need, says Kelly.

It is also possible to have a sin-gle phone number to cover a fixed and mobile phone. That may not sound very revolutionary, but provides an easy answer to the old question of “Which number shall I call you on?”

When someone calls the number, the recipient’s fixed and mobile phones ring at the same time. This is an invaluable feature, say, for a service-based company that wants to be available around the clock. And for the customer, there is just one number to call, regardless of the time.

UC can also bring people togeth-er in more subtle ways, too. For in-

APPLICATIoNS Today’s workers don’t just use their mobile phones to make and receive phone calls and texts. Increasingly, these devices provide them with a window on a wealth of corporate information, as Ron Condon explains

The portable office


A workplace that follows you from place to place

© Il

lust

ratio

n W

orks

/ A

lam

y

stance, they can deliver the notion of ‘presence’, a feature that allows everyone to see whether their peers are available for a call, in a meeting, or offline at any one moment.

If someone – let’s call him Jim – wants to contact John and sees that John is currently free (usu-ally with a green light next to his name), he knows it’s OK to

call without disturbing him. Jim may also want to bring James and Sally into a quick phone con-ference with John, and seeing a green light by both their names, is able to activate the conference from his handset (fixed or mo-bile, it doesn’t matter). The fact that all four people may all be out and about is no barrier to com-munication. They can have their conference call without delay, and then carry on with what they were doing.

With presence, participants in a meeting don’t need to be in the same building anymore - or even the same country. That reduces time spent travelling, helping the organisation they work for to re-duce its carbon footprint.

Companies are also now bor-rowing from social networking sites to create a more collegiate and collaborative environment, even where individuals may rarely meet face-to-face. For example, Saleforce.com has recently intro-duced the Chatter function to its system to allow users to interact electronically in the same way as they would on sites such as Twit-ter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Users can set up their profile, fol-low other people in the company (as in Twitter) and be informed immediately of any new thing that person does. They can also post requests for help, and anyone is free to chip in with advice. They can also ‘follow’ documents such as price lists or company presenta-

tions; if they change, the individual will immediately be alerted.

That kind of informal connec-tion can go a long way in making up for the isolation that remote workers often feel, and can provide them with the kind of informa-tion that traditionally is picked up during conversations by the water-cooler. Older workers may take a while to adjust to that way of work-ing, but the new generation of com-pany recruits are more than happy to conduct their relationships in cy-berspace - in fact, it may be some-thing that they expect.

It is huge opportunity for organi-sations of all sizes to rethink how they do business and organise their staff. They just need the vision and imagination to make it happen.


Case study: halcrow group

Engineering consulting giant, Halcrow Group has 7,000 workers spread around the world, working on large construction projects from the CrossRail infrastructure in London to flood de-fences for St Petersburg.

Providing those professionals with the right tools to communicate with each other across thousands of miles is a key element in mak-ing the company effective and keeping costs under control.

The company’s group IT director Chris Farmer explains the task: “We constantly need to look at how to take advantage of the skills we have in all our staff, and how to get better collabora-tion. And we need to ensure we get the right communication between various members of our project teams.”

He says that 15 to 20 years ago, the com-pany might ship out a whole team to deliver a project somewhere in the world, but in today’s cost-conscious world, a more streamlined ap-proach is required. “Now we look for ways to have people collaborating from their desktop. We can’t afford to fly people around the world to participate in short meetings when we can use other technologies, and save the carbon footprint. We can save money and be more cost-effective for our customers.”

To achieve that, he needed more effec-tive and flexible communications systems. “We have always had a solid data network-ing infrastructure,” he says. “We had reliable email, file transfer and document sharing. But we felt we needed to move to a next step to leverage our skills better.”

A review of the voice networks, data networks and the company’s use of mobile phones has

led to a radical rethink. Working with Vodafone UK, Halcrow has adopted the Vodafone One unified communications [UC] solution, which essentially brings all the communications needs together in one contract.

“We have totally replaced our existing infrastruc-ture in the UK. We had 25 disparate telephone systems, but we are migrating them all into a sin-gle UK-wide telephone system, part of the Voda-fone One solution,” he says. “We have upgraded our data network to be able to handle both voice and data traffic, and we are deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server to give us desktop collaboration tools that people will need. This is all glued together by Vodafone One.”

As well as providing estimated savings of £1 million over the next five years, the unified sys-tem will make it much easier for members of the Group to collaborate remotely and to pool their skills for specific projects when needed.

“We want our staff to be reachable wherever they are. Everyone will have a single phone number – so if someone rings me, my mobile will ring, as will the phone on my desk, and the soft client on my PC,” Farmer says.

“The aim is to provide a flexible toolkit for all of our staff, and over time we’ll find that staff will select the technologies that best reflect their working styles.”

With one tariff for all phones, he says there is no impediment to people using or calling each other’s mobile phones, and this will also encourage greater communication, as well as a greater use of hot-desking. “With this technolo-gy, their phones follow them wherever they go. They can work from anywhere with no impact on customer experience,” he says.

Mobile working in numbers

1.2 billion Number of mobile workers worldwide by 2012 (IDC)

235 million Number of smartphones expected to ship globally by the end of 2010 (Topology Research Institute)

41% Percentage of European multinationals with a mobile working solution already in place (Vodafone Global Enterprise)

85% Percentage of workers who say they would be more likely to stay with their employer if they introduced flexible working options. (Hays)

Peter Kelly, vodafone:

Customers expect instant service these days, so business is increasingly about real-time communications

Getting the best value out of each and every investment is crucial for any organisation

and rarely have costs been under such pressure as they are today. The benefits of flexible, mobile work-ing are well established, but experts warn that they will not be realised unless costs are carefully managed, through control of equipment, bet-ter visibility into where costs are incurred and greater influence over users’ behaviour.

Today, too many organisations lack the level of oversight they need, according to Glyn Owen, portfolio manager at UK sys-tems integrator, Damovo: “Many businesses need to re-think their mobility management strategy, so that employees can keep the convenience of using their mo-bile devices wherever they choose,

but at the same time utilise the company’s existing infrastructure more in order to help trim costs.”

In a recent survey of 100 UK IT directors commissioned by Dam-ovo and conducted by independ-ent research company Vanson Bourne, respondents estimated that almost half (42 per cent) of corporate mobile calls are made within the office.

Companies need to have the technology in place that allows them to make those calls in the most efficient manner possible.

There are now new ways to do this, Gary Butler, head of Voda-fone’s Unified Communications Group, explains: “With unified communications, you can actu-ally enable employees to commu-nicate in the way that best suits them and the job that they do – regardless of where they are based

or if they are using a mobile or a fixed line, for example.”

By consolidating communica-tions suppliers, he adds, businesses pay a flat rate for each user for both fixed and mobile combined, giving them “total control of costs and ne-gating the need to restrict employ-ees from using one method of com-munication over another.”

A NEW APPROAChThe benefits of an approach based on unified communications, or UC, is echoed by Guy Lidbetter, chief technical officer for man-aged operations at systems in-tegration company Atos Origin. With a UC strategy, he says, “rath-er than trying to force behaviour, you find a way of working that leverages the cost benefits.”

“The system knows if some-body is in the office, on the move

FINANCE As employees increasingly view the mobile phone as their primary means of communication, the pressure is on for their employers to keep a keen eye on costs while allowing them to work flexibly. By Rod Newing


Pinning down costs

Four out of ten CIOs say that developing and improving the performance of mobile business appli-cations is a key investment priority for 2010, according to recent research commissioned by Vodafone. The survey was conducted by polling company Opinion Matters in June 2010 among 210 CIOs and 1,200 workers in private and public-sector organisations with more than 500 employees. The overriding consensus among those surveyed was that they want the tools necessary to do their job from their mobile devices, rather than ‘gimmick’ tools from app stores. Many responses focused on improving access and interaction with existing corporate systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and time management (job scheduling). A large number also cited unified communications-style apps, for locating colleagues, contacting team members and conferencing capabilities. The good news for workers is that nine out of ten CIOs polled said that their organisations are in the process of developing various business-specific mobile applications, as outlined in the graph below.

mobile apps prioritised for corporate investment

mobile business apps under developmentPercentage of CIOs developing them

CRM

Data collection

Database management

Task management

Financial management tools

e-commerce

Inventory management/order tracking

Consumer apps for customers

Sales forecasting

Lone worker/employeee tracking

We are not developing any appsSource: Vodafone/Opinion Matters, June 2010

44%

45%

43%

42%

34%

32%

27%

21%

19.5%

13%

11%

or at home and an appropri-ate device would ring to contact you, depending on what you are doing, taking the decision away from the user and putting the in-telligence in the platform.”

Frank Modruson, CIO at man-agement consulting giant Accen-ture, points out that many PCs to-day provide handset capabilities. The company’s mobile workforce is equipped with laptops that have built-in microphones and new laptops have built-in webcams. Microsoft Office Communicator software turns the laptops into full-featured office telephones, providing peer-to-peer voice and audio conferencing capabilities and desktop video conferencing.

“We provide our mobile work-force with anyone, anywhere, any-time mobile access to everything,” he says. “We average more than 20 million minutes of desktop video and audio conference calls per month. It has slashed mo-bile and land line expenses; helps [employees] to communicate and collaborate more effectively; and reduces travel.”

One way is to enable handsets to switch automatically between mobile networks and fixed net-works. The Unlicensed Mobile Access protocol provides access to voice and data services over unlicensed spectrum technologies like WiFi or BlueTooth. Femto-cell technology, such as Vodafone Sure Signal, uses home and fixed broadband to boost the mobile signal in the home or small office for up to four people at the same time. That means that staff who cannot get a sufficiently strong signal at home are still able to use their mobile.

bETTER billiNgFor many businesses, reviewing the monthly mobile bill can be a time-consuming and complex task, mak-ing it hard to identify where costs can be cut and usage made more effective. In Damovo’s survey, for example, more than a third (37 per cent) of the IT directors surveyed confessed that they didn’t bother to scrutinise mobile bills.

“In order to start reducing their mobile costs, many organisations need to have better visibility over their mobile usage,” says Owen.

“This is where UC can really make a difference to management of communication suppliers and costs. It allows businesses to work with one supplier for all their communications and get one bill,” says Vodafone’s Butler. “It cuts the time it takes to deal with multiple suppliers and also gives a transparent view of costs. It also means that businesses can realise their mobility strategies, as they aren’t dictating to employees how to connect or communicate, but instead allowing them to work in a way that makes them more ef-fective and efficient.”

Another complication is that mobile costs also flow into the company through other sources.

Employee expense systems may be used for home broadband, WiFi hotspots in hotels, fixed data con-nections or fixed line calls.

“The real challenge is under-standing where all your costs lie, end-to-end,” says Lidbetter of Atos

Origin. “If you ask a chief financial officer how much mobile workers are claiming back on expenses for hotspot connections, they don’t know, because it is buried deep as a line item on an expense claim or included in a hotel bill. Unless you can extract the true cost, it is really hard to measure.”

He points out that there is no way of knowing whether at a par-ticular time in a particular place it would have been cheaper to make a mobile call, use a PC data card, use a WiFi consolidator or use the hotel’s WiFi connection. Never-theless, he believes that there are definite costs savings to be real-ised, as long as the organisation can be sure that it understands all the costs in the system, especially those that are hidden.

“People save ‘headline’ costs because they are visible and measurable,” he says. “They move costs around and make them in-tangible and unmeasurable. It is hard to measure the intangible costs of putting more effort onto individuals with new ways of working, to save up-front costs. If you don’t understanding the hid-den costs in the system you will change the thing that is most ob-vious without realising that you are having an impact somewhere else and introducing extra costs elsewhere in the system.”

A qUESTiON OF CUlTUREOrganisations have to choose whether to use technology to force users to communicate in a certain way, through devices or function-ality, or give them a choice. Choice involves influencing users to take cost into account when making decisions. It is further complicated by the fact that many corporate users want to exercise their choice to use their own personal devices, such as smartphones and tablets, to access corporate systems.

“To fully realise the benefits of enterprise mobility, a change of culture and behaviour needs to take place over a long period

of time,” says Marie Puybaraud, director global for workplace in-novation at Johnson Controls. “Psychological barriers, such as an attachment to having one’s own desk-space and the routine of working from 9am to 5pm often need to be overcome. The organisation’s leadership has to foster this change by embracing technology and this new, mobile way of working, which involves both an element of trust that em-ployees can work effectively away

from the office and often the need to encourage them to do so.”

Puybaraud says that in an in-creasingly knowledge-intensive economy, rather than having an autocratic structure, where in-formation is passed down a fixed chain of command, organisations must behave more like networked enterprises with a series of inter-connected ecosystems. This chang-es the organisation from a static place where individuals perform a specific role within a defined hier-archy into a collaborative hub.

Owen of Damovo concludes that organisations require greater con-trol over their mobile costs, while allowing end users the freedom to use their mobile phones where ever they chose. “This should form part of an overall mobility management strategy,” he says, “including device, service and security management, which are ever more important for today’s mobile deployments.”


The analyst view

“The trend is to harmonise communications. Give every mem-ber of staff the right tool in their hand for the job they need to do, where they need to do it from,” says Katja Ruud, an analyst at IT market analyst firm, Gartner.

For her, cost control involves not just consolidation of net-works, to end ‘duplication of dial tone’, but negotiating with providers; making the handsets work harder for the organisa-tion; and using all available tools.

Negotiating with providers depends on the competitive situation in each country. Ms Ruud says that it may be possible to negotiate a regional agreement covering, say, ten countries. However, it can be harder for a truly multinational company with 150 sites spread around the world. The largest contracts so far only cover about 110 countries. “They can be done by some of the larger providers,” she says, “but they have to go off their own network and there is a cost associated with having to manage other providers.”

She advises her clients to be aware of current competitive rates before starting to negotiate. She also advises building in expec-tations of future consumption. The operators’ offers are usually based on the previous year’s spending, but as mobile devices are being used for much more than voice calls, usage can increase.

Making handsets work harder means harnessing the increas-ing number of smartphones by loading applications that enable the mobile workforce to become more efficient. “Providers are looking for manual processes within an organisation that they can mobilise,” she says, “to reduce manual effort, cut down on the number of errors caused by manual input and to speed up the processing cycle.”

It is also important to use all the tools available from oper-ators to manage mobility. These cover areas like expense management, telecommunications expense management, bill analysis and invoice management. They help companies to track how much is be-ing spent and can raise alerts for high usage, she points out.

She adds that device management systems are important to ensure that each device has the right version of the right applications. They also enable an organisation to main-tain control of the use of functionality, by dis-abling functions like cameras or helping to enable WiFi usability.

gary butler, vodafone :

With unified communications, you can actually enable employees to communicate in a way that best suits them and the job that they do

The great escape: do mobile costs need tying down?

In order to reduce costs, organisations

need to have better visibility into mobile usage

© p

inta

ilpic

ture

s /

Ala

my

Flexible and mobile work-ing is already a reality for at least a sizeable minor-ity of UK companies. A

survey by management consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) found that 42 per cent of businesses now allow employees to work from home.

There are many benefits to this new approach, as this report has outlined - it’s good for workers and their employers, too. But could it also be good for the planet?

A recent report by Accenture and Vodafone Group predicts that ‘de-materialisation’ – replacing physi-cal goods, processes or travel with virtual alternatives – could reduce carbon emissions by 22.1 million tonnes per year by 2020, saving €14.1 billion (£11.8 million) in en-ergy costs along the way.

Combined with other initia-tives to reduce emissions, a total of 113 million tonnes could be achieved (see graph); equivalent to 2.4 per cent of the expected EU emissions for 2020.

A report published last year by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), meanwhile, also argues that remote working has a sizeable role to play in meeting carbon reduction targets.

“All too often, the discussion about reduction of greenhouse gases is caught in an old dichot-omy, where increased quality of life is presented as if it is in conflict with the need to move away from a dependency on fos-sil fuel,” observes Dennis Pamlin, a WWF global policy advisor, in his preface to the report, ‘From workplace to anyplace’. But to-day, he adds, new and innovative technology solutions exist that can both provide a better quality of life and contribute to dramati-cally reduced emissions.

Virtual meetings and telecom-muting are two of the most interest-ing and innovative climate solutions that can contribute to a higher qual-ity of life and decreased ecologi-cal footprint, according to Pamlin. “Lately these solutions have begun to be used on a wider scale, but the

potential is enormous and has not yet been recognised,” he says.

According to the report, increas-ing virtual meetings and telecom-muting today could, “without any dramatic measures”, help to save more than 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions in a few decades; this is equivalent to approximately half of the current US CO2 emissions.

A SizEAblE OPPORTUNiTYThe most obvious savings associ-ated with mobile working come in the reduction of energy required for heating, cooling, lighting and computing power for their em-ployer, although research by con-sulting firm WSP Environmental suggests the average homeworker emits nearly 30 per cent more at

home than they would in an office in terms of energy use.

Yet significant savings can also be made on travel, through not having to commute to the office at all or by avoiding peak hours. “A mobile working strategy may enable some employees to take fewer journeys by car, train or even plane than would

otherwise be the case,” says Michael Rendell, head of human resource services at PWC. “It doesn’t have to mean allowing all staff to spend more time working from home,” he adds.

Technology company Logica has gone from having just 1 per cent of its staff working from home at least one day a week in 2007, to 80 per cent in 2010, across its network of 5,500 UK staff.

“As a result of that, we decided to close down 12 of our 28 build-ings across the UK, as much to get our headcount down as our environmental footprint,” says Tony Rooke, head of sustainabil-ity at Logica. Despite subsequently opening two new premises, Rooke estimates the company has re-duced its energy consumption by

The green perspective

ENvIroNMENT Sustainability may not be the primary driver of flexible working, but it’s an attractive knock-on benefit for many companies, says Nick Martindale


As we move to new transnational targets on

carbon emissions, mobile working will become a key area of sustainability

Quantifying mobile’s role in tackling climate change in five key areas

opportunity Carbon abatement potential Energy cost savings Total connections required to achieve EU-25 in 2020 (Mt Co2e) (€ billion) these savings (million)

Dematerialisation 22.1 14.1 139.3Smart grid 43.1 11.4 495.1Smart logistics 35.2 13.2 83.7Smart cities 10.5 3.7 3.3Smart manufacturing 1.9 0.8 318.6Total 113.0 43.0 1,040.0

Source: Vodafone/Accenture Carbon Connections

Carbon connections

© D

eco

/ A

lam

y

around 10 per cent, reversing what was previously a growth trend.

IBM, too, reports similar progress. Around 75 per cent of managers now work with remote employees, says Alison Gregory, senior manag-ing consultant in global business services at IBM UK, and around 40 per cent of its global workforce is equipped for mobile working.

“Our offices now have enough capacity for only 40 per cent of our workforce at any one time,” she says. In the US alone, this accounted for a reduction of more than 5 million gallons of fuel and 50,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, she adds.

Like many organisations, com-munications provider KCOM Group did not go down the route of implementing flexible and mo-bile working purely for the envi-ronmental benefits. In its case, the main motivation was to use itself as a case study for potential clients, as well as to deliver pro-ductivity gains.

“There was a line in the busi-ness case which said it would sup-port our “Greener Me” agenda, but we didn’t actually realise that it was going to be a key piece,” says Dean Branton, group CIO. “But we have a reduced number of people in the offices we’ve got and we’ve been able to close floors down in offices.”

Travel-related emissions have fallen by around 23 per cent over the past year, he says, even allowing for a 15 per cent reduction in headcount.

A KNOCK-ON bENEFiTAccording to Ghislaine Caulat, head of the virtual working prac-tice at Ashridge Business School, the environmental benefits are not yet a key driver of flexible and mobile working. “It has been an important by-product benefit to add to our clients’ credentials, but not the main motivation,” she says, although exceptions to this

are found in Scandinavian and Nordic countries.

The benefits of flexible and mo-bile working do not have to be confined to larger companies, how-ever. Four years ago, Norfolk-based start-up advisory group NWES calculated its annual mileage as an organisation was 150,000 miles.

“We made a commitment to re-duce mileage and one of the key strategies was to use technology,” says Gary Hewitt, head of sup-port. “We now have business advi-sors that can dial into our servers, using secure VPN access either via home broadband or USB dongles, and a company mindset of al-lowing and trusting staff to work from home.” Annual mileage per employee has fallen by 30 per cent as a result, he adds.

The use of mobile technology also extends to helping organi-sations with workers who spend much of their time on the road operate more efficiently. Prop-erty maintenance business Rok Group is currently rolling out PDAs across its mobile work-force, which use an application from ClickSoftware to plot the

most effective route to a custom-er’s house and alerts them when they are on their way to cut down on wasted trips.

“Because we know where our technicians are at any point in time, we’re also able to send the person who is nearest to the job,” says Claire Hamon, CIO at Rok. “That cuts down the amount of wasted travel as well.”

The organisation has also im-plemented a new network to en-able staff to work from home, building sites or their nearest of-fice – all of which now operate a ‘hot-desking’ system – as part of plans to reduce its carbon foot-print by 30 per cent this year.

There are, however, challenges that need to be overcome for businesses that are serious about delivering environmental ben-efits through flexible and mobile working.

Sak Nayagam, head of climate change solutions and sustainabil-ity services across Europe, Africa and Latin America at manage-ment consultancy company Ac-centure, points out the need to be able to measure the benefits of

such an approach, including an assessment of energy consumed by staff in their own homes dur-ing the day. Professor Peter Co-chrane, former chief technology officer at BT who now works as a futurologist, adds that a lack of bandwidth in homes is still an obstacle to technologies such as videoconferencing.

Overall, though, there can be lit-tle doubt that flexible and mobile working can – if undertaken and monitored correctly – deliver tan-gible reductions to energy usage and carbon emissions, as well as bottom-line savings.

“In conducting energy audits with our clients it is clear that the carbon footprint of the work-force, both travelling and then consuming energy-hungry office environments, is very high,” says Gregory at IBM UK.

“Significant economic advan-tage can be achieved by reducing consumption of traditional office space. As we move to new tran-snational targets on carbon emis-sions, this will become a key area of sustainability when organisa-tions plan their settings.”

Could the daily commute soon be a thing of the past?


Recent research

Mobile workforce to surpass 1 billionThe world’s mobile worker population is set to pass the one billion mark this year, according to recent research from IT market analyst company, IDC. By 2013, the company’s analysts predict, it will rise to almost 1.2 billion people - more than one third of the world’s total workforce. The majority of those workers are predicted to come from the US and Japan, where 75.5 and 74.5 per cent the workforce, respectively, will be mobile, with Western Europe trailing on 50.3 per cent.The most significant gains, however, will be in the emerging econo-mies of Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan), where a strong economic recov-ery and new interest in unified communications is expected to drive healthy growth in all aspects of mobility spending. By 2013, only 37.4 per cent of the region’s workforce will be mobile - yet this group alone will represent 62 per cent of the world’s total mobile workforce.In Canada and the emerging-market countries of Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, the mobile worker population will represent 13.5 percent of the total workforce by 2013, but the opportunities mobile presents for these regions should not be underestimated, according to Sean Ryan, a research analyst at IDC. “Vast opportunities exist for bringing a variety of mobile technologies to the world’s workforce,” he says. “Underserved mobile workers across all regions stand to benefit from the reach and flexibility offered by mo-bile solutions. While some barriers to adoption will still have to be over-come, the potential market for mobility solutions is enormous.”

mobile workers as proportion of total regional workforce, 2013

n US n Japan n Western Europe n Asia-Pacific (excl. Japan) n Rest of World

Source: IDC, 2010

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

75.5% 74.5%

50.3%

37.4%

13.5%

Smartphones to overtake laptops By 2012, sales of smartphones will surpass sales of laptop PCs, driven by changes in the way most people hop onto the Web , say analysts at IT market research firm Gartner. They expect smartphone sales to shoot past $191 billion that year, while laptop sales will total $152 billion.Currently, smartphones account for just 14 per cent of overall hand-set sales, but Gartner’s analysts expect that proportion to have risen to 37 per cent by 2010. Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, believes that as mobile PC and smartphone capabilities converge, smartphones will increasingly represent a market opportunity that most PC vendors will feel unable to ignore. But they may struggle to get to grips with the market opportunity, he adds: “The smartphone and notebook markets are governed by different rules when it comes to success-fully marketing and selling products.”

Sales of devices, 2012 (in $ billion)

n Smartphones n Laptop PCs

Source: Gartner, 2009

240

220

200

180

160

140

120

100

80

60

40

20

0

$ 191 billion

$ 152 billion

michael Rendell, PWC:

A mobile working strategy may enable some employees to take fewer journeys by car, train or even plane than would otherwise be the case

When staff arrive for work at Vodafone this morning, they probably won’t

head for a specific desk or an al-located office space. The company has a philosophy of flexible work-ing that allows staff to work from anywhere on any of its sites, ena-bling them to sit face-to-face with relevant colleagues from else-where in the business, according to the project they’re currently involved in. It also allows them to work from home when needed.

This presents a massive chal-lenge for Brian Burton, head of IT security at Vodafone UK. Like all listed companies, Vodafone has re-sponsibilities to protect informa-tion security and ensure that cus-tomer data remains confidential. But the company doesn’t base its security policy on devices, he says, but on the nature of the informa-tion involved. “Our employees use a combination of 3G and wireless access, but our wireless security policy is based on the idea that we look after all information in the same way, regardless of how it’s being accessed,” says Burton.

Managing security is a vital part of any wireless deployment. The or-ganisation needs to protect the mo-bile device itself, the access route back into the corporate network, and any data that may be stored on the device, or transmitted between the device and corporate systems.

“Organisations need to keep every aspect of their IT landscape safe and secure to enable flexible working in a way that is robust and protected, by using tools such as Vodafone Secure Remote Ac-cess (VSRA) and smartphone se-curity,” says Burton.

At the very least, the security of such information should be at least as good as the security provided to non-wireless users, but in many cases, it might need to be even greater, cautions Bob Tarzey, a re-search director with Quocirca.

“If your staff are connecting to public WiFi networks in coffee shops, airports or hotels, then you need to ensure that very strong security is applied, so data should be encrypted and there should be strong tools to authenticate both the user and device,” he says.

At the same time, any security applied to wireless users must balance security with usability. Requiring users to undergo fre-quent or complex security checks just to log in to networks might frustrate or confuse them, damag-ing productivity and potentially causing some workers to seek out ways to bypass carefully thought-out security procedures.

“There’s no point making some inconsequential information very secure if it means someone can no longer do their job effectively,” says Tarzey. “At every level, you need to ensure that you are protecting in-formation, but also doing whatever you can within that to help people do their jobs productively.”

TACTiCAl mEASURESOne way to maintain the delicate bal-ance between security and usability is to actively educate workers, so that they understand the importance of information and wireless security. That way, they are less likely to try and find ‘loopholes’, says Avtar Sehm-bi, head of security and IT risk man-agement with Deloitte. “Of course,

we can configure the network to only allow access to specific devices, but it’s equally important to educate us-ers about the consequences of infor-mation leaks,” he says.

At Deloitte, a significant part of Sehmbi’s budget is allocated to creating a series of hard-hitting messages about the consequences of poor wireless security, with simple slogans and attention-grabbing photographs strategi-cally placed around the building. “We focus on the impact of the breach on the firm, and on the individual - and it works, because people do stop and read, and ask questions,” Sehmbi says.

One of the most popular op-tion for providing secure wire-less access to corporate networks is an SSL VPN, or virtual private network. This technology allows companies to securely identify re-mote users and devices, and then applies strong encryption to data that is transmitted wirelessly be-tween the user and the corporate network. Effectively, information can be sent through a secure ‘tun-nel’ on the public internet.

SECUrITY Smart companies safeguard mobile data rigourously – but they don’t let security measures stand in the way of user convenience, as Sally Whittle explains


Securing the mobile workforceCase study: lancashire Constabulary

It’s hard to imagine information more confidential than data relating to crimes, suspects and victims. For officers within Lan-cashire Constabulary, however, that’s exactly the kind of infor-mation they need on a constant and reliable basis in order to keep the streets of north-west England safe.

In the past, the risks of using intelligence systems across open networks were deemed too great. As a result, officers depended on desktop access at local police stations, reducing the time they spent out in the community.

Officers working from home had to rely on broadband-based virtual private network (VPN) links that were expensive and time-consuming to set up. Those in community-based neighbourhood police teams had to travel back to headquarters to access systems.

The lack of remote access to data also posed a major problem for the constabulary’s senior officers, who spend much of their time on the move, travelling to meetings with government agen-cies and with their peers from other police forces across the UK.

With these challenges in mind, Lancashire Constabulary ran a tender to find solutions. Of the responses received, only Vodafone met the force’s exacting security requirements, according to Stuart Fillingham, head of information and communications technology.

Three separate projects were piloted. In the first, 25 police officers are accessing intelligence systems using existing lap-tops or lightweight netbooks. Vodafone Secure Remote Ac-cess (VSRA) gives them reliable, secure connectivity through a choice of networks. The IT team, says Fillingham, can set poli-cies for each user, preventing browsing outside the VPN and prohibiting the use of specific applications.

In a second pilot programme, Vodafone has proposed a solu-tion for neighbourhood policing teams, who frequently occupy temporary sites within local communities and often share these with partner agencies. Remote access to intelligence systems via desktop computers on these premies will meet the technol-ogy needs of neighbourhood teams and increase their com-munity presence. The solution will also enable fast set-up of incident rooms at crime scenes.

The third pilot scheme, meanwhile, focuses on automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology. By connecting spe-cialist ANPR cameras with back-office systems through Vodafone mobile broadband, Lancashire Constabulary has found an inex-pensive, simple way to extend its use of ANPR in crime prevention.

Real-time access to intelligence data will transform the way officers interact with citizens, says Fillingham, and because data will be updated remotely, they will always be working with the most recent information.

“If a member of the public asks a question at a community meeting, our officers will be able to locate the information they need to give a thorough, accurate answer on the spot. A Chief Inspector making a presentation at the Home Office will have access to up-to-the-minute reports,” he says.

Out on the streets, meanwhile, police officers will be able to monitor incidents without driving back to the station, and make decisions based on timely, accurate data. “VSRA will also enable us to create shared sites and incident rooms at a sig-nificantly lower cost than with any other solution we have con-sidered,” says Fillingham. It will also allow the force to deploy ANPR camera quickly and inexpensively.

And within individual homes, officers providing out-of-hours cover will use secure home connections to view incident logs, rather than travelling to the station, helping them to respond faster, and also improving work/life balance.

But above all, the fact that no compromise is made on data security is one of the biggest benefits of this relationship. These projects will enable the Lancashire Constabulary to provide re-mote access in compliance with National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) standards.

How can companies keep data

safe when it’s always on the

move?

to the corporate network, depending on how far a user and device meets the Trust’s security policies.

“For example, when someone logs on, the network looks at their device and assesses whether it meets our re-quirements, and will either let them have access, only let them have ac-cess to browser-based information, or just provide them with simple web browsing,” says Hewitt.

This is important, because it en-sures that patients who might access the network using their own laptops and devices cannot compromise the network’s security. “A patient who brings in their laptop will have inter-net access, but the moment they try to do anything else, the security system will block them. It’s very rigourous.”

Although the system is highly sensitive, Hewitt says that wireless security is always a balancing act for IT departments. “Of course we need to provide a wireless network that is secure, but from the user perspective, having multiple log-ins and authenti-cation methods reduces productivity to such an extent that you lose most of the return on investment from the wireless technology,” he says.


Securing the mobile workforce Case study: bowman Riley

Bowman riley is a 42-year old architecture firm, based in the Yorkshire market town of Skipton. It employs more than 50 staff who regularly need to visit clients around the country.

“We rely heavily on technology to enable staff, and most people are working off laptops and docking stations,” explains Michael Feather, the firm’s associate director. “We also need re-ally robust and reliable communications, because people aren’t just sending emails; they need to access CAD (computer-aided design) applications and drawings.”

Traditionally, providing mobile access to this sort of informa-tion in a secure fashion has been a challenge, but recent de-velopments in the availability of public wireless access has dra-matically changed the way a firm like Bowman Riley operates.

“The size of files we transfer is significant – even a photo of a site might easily be 2MB,” says Feather. “But we’ve found over the past two years we’ve been able to send drawings and graphics files over wireless without any real problems.”

Bowman Riley has invested in a secure SSL VPN [virtual private network] from Star Internet, which allows staff to log on to a secure internet connection to the corporate network. “With the VPN, staff are able to use wireless connections to access the servers,” says Feather. “Because it’s a VPN, we know that the connection is completely secure, and they have to use that to access anything other than their email.”

Occasionally, the company issues employees with 3G smart phones when they need to work on building sites where there will not be WiFi access, but because of the complexity of infor-mation that staff need to access, most prefer not to use phones for anything other than basic messaging.

Alongside the technical security provided by the VPN, the firm has a robust QA [quality assurance] policy that specifies how and where staff can use wireless connections and how information can be kept secure. “For example, our policy dictates that information is never stored locally, everything is based on the server. The moment you stop working, it all goes back up to the server, so the C drive on your machine remains virtually empty,” says Feather.

Providing wireless access to staff has transformed productiv-ity for the firm, adds Feather. Previously, if a client was based in Somerset, the architect might have a 12-hour round trip during which they wouldn’t have access to any information based on the company’s servers. “Now, people can ring, and send draw-ings or files very quickly, which is important because if you’re working on-site, it can be days before you physically get back into the office,” says Feather.

With an SSL VPN, once the user logs-in to the system, all data is securely encrypted during transmission, effectively creating a secure tunnel through the public internet. The VPN provided by Star Internet has been particularly useful to Bowman Riley, Feather says, because it can be embedded into a browser so that anyone using a device capable of running Internet Explor-er can access the VPN.

Mobile VPNs are also available, which are designed specifically for lower-bandwidth devices and can optimise these kinds of connec-tions. A VPN is a highly effective wireless security tool, but must be combined with a a comprehensive security management policy and back-end security management tools that support that policy.

mASS CONSUmERiSATiONIncreasingly, IT security chiefs face a new problem: members of staff who insist on bringing their own handset to work and wish to use it to access corporate information. There’s a growing feeling that this trend - the consumerisation of cor-porate IT - may be unstoppable.

In recent months, Ryan Hewitt, senior network and security sys-tems engineer at South Manches-ter NHS Trust, has become more relaxed about the prospect of staff accessing corporate networks with their own mobile devices.

“Initially, we planned to be very strict about the issue, but you’ve got to go with the times, and we have people who buy their own device

based on their preference for a Mac laptop, or an iPhone, or whatever,” he explains. “It seems silly for us to say to our employees – who aren’t gener-ally expert computer users – that they can’t use something that would make their job easier for them.”

The majority of staff working at South Manchester NHS Trust are mobile and all have access to a cam-pus-wide wireless network. The net-work, which uses Aruba technology, is configured to provide ‘tiered’ access

bob Tarzey, quocirca:

At every level, you need to ensure that you are protecting information, but also doing whatever you can within that to help people do their jobs productively

© R

ay T

ang

/Rex

Fea

ture

s

In a world where machines, monitors and meters are able to automatically report on their status, convey data

to other devices and receive in-structions remotely, employees are free to work on more pro-ductive activities.

That is why smart companies are increasingly adopting machine-to-machine (M2M) communications over mobile phone networks to au-tomate a wide variety of mundane data collection and reporting tasks.

This improves efficiency, saves costs and creates opportunities for

new services, which is why compa-nies are incorporating M2M tech-nology into utility meters, medical sensors and in-car electronics. In the process, say technologists, they are rapidly creating what might be dubbed an ‘internet of things’.

M2M-enabled systems are fitted with a specialised SIM card that re-ceives and transmits information, via cellular networks, to a central server where it is analysed and acted upon. Some of these connections occur over a relatively short range, others over a distance of many miles.

Applications range from the quirky – dog collars fitted with tracking devices to locate lost pets – to the life-saving – monitors at-tached to heart patients that alert doctors remotely to abnormal readings. Most M2M applications, however, are more down-to-earth: they involve collecting readings previously gathered by human in-spectors from meters, car consoles and vending machines.

The number of M2M connec-tions in Western Europe could quadruple over the next four years from 25m to 100m, according to communications research firm Ju-niper Research. “Smart metering is the largest segment in the M2M market,” explains Anthony Cox, senior analyst at Juniper Research.

“It is followed by consumer and commercial telematics (M2M in vehicles) and connections designed to monitor buildings for security purposes or against flood or fire,” he says. Eventually, he predicts, the con-cept of the ‘smart home’ may take off, where heating, lighting and se-curity can all be managed remotely through a cellular connection.

The technology is nothing new: M2M has been around for more than twenty years. What has changed is the arrival of reliable, ubiquitous mobile networks, cheap SIM cards and a clutch of applica-tions that look set to boost the take-up of M2M considerably.

“As the mobile market becomes more and more saturated, operators are looking for new revenue streams and M2M is one answer,” says Cox. “While M2M will rarely provide rev-enues to match a human subscriber, device volumes can be huge and churn rates are much lower. Once a connection is in place it is likely to

be there for the lifetime of the device into which it has been installed.”

“While the revenues associated with the actual connectivity are small, operators believe that they can create a service in the M2M area which they can charge for such as setting up systems or providing for the seamless addition of devices to an existing project,” he adds.

Vodafone, which claims 40% of the UK market, has invested consid-

erable sums of money in building an international M2M platform. “The next major growth stream for us will come from M2M,” confirms Peter Kelly, enterprise director at Vodafone. “We know it is a market that is here today. Most of our research tells us that

the two big growth markets are first transportation and logistics and second smart metering. Telemedicine is still in its earliest stages.”

A SmARTER gRiDLarge-scale programmes look likely to kick-start M2M. In the US for example, President Obama has earmarked $4.5 billion to develop a smart electricity grid using two-way digital communication. Wire-less M2M is also at the heart of an even larger UK project to replace an estimated 46 million gas and elec-tricity meters with smart meters that monitor energy as it is con-sumed and transmit the informa-tion directly to suppliers.

The UK government has set 2020 as the deadline to complete a project costing around £9 billion that is likely to be as demanding as the introduc-tion of North Sea gas in the 1970s. The pay-off is potential savings of £17.8 billion over 20 years for domes-tic and smaller business customers.

Savings will come from moni-tors in premises that give customers immediate feedback on how much energy they are using. Suppliers will also use two-way M2M to change tar-iffs and eventually control how appli-ances are used: turning machines off at peak periods, adjusting settings on boilers or restricting the time when an electric car may be recharged.

The metering project will be the first step in creating a smart grid for energy in which the activities of generators, suppliers and consum-ers are more intelligently managed. Smart grids will be vital in coping with rising demand for energy that is increasingly produced from less predictable, renewable sources.

Smart grids will match supply more closely with demand and al-low excess capacity from private energy sources such as heat pumps,

Talking machinesM2M TECHNoLoGY From vending machines to heart monitors, devices that can share information over mobile networks have the potential to transform working lives. John Lamb investigates


Anthony Cox, Juniper Research:

Once an M2M connection is in place, it is likely to be there for the lifetime of the device into which it has been installed

M2M communications is the networking of in-telligent, communications-enabled remote as-sets. This technology allows key information to be exchanged automatically without human in-tervention, and covers a broad range of technol-ogies and applications that connect the physical world – whether machines or monitored physical conditions – to a back-end IT infrastructure.

These remote assets, which can be fixed or mobile, include cars and truck fleets, utility me-ters, copiers and printers, kiosks and wireless displays, ventilation and air-conditioning sen-sors, home medical devices, fitness monitors and CCTV cameras.

The physical conditions they monitor can include temperature, location, consump-tion, heart rate, stress levels, light, movement, altitude and speed.

M2M communications can be used to gain immediate feedback on how a particular re-

mote asset is being used, which features are most popular and what problems such as errors or breakdowns typically arise. This information is useful for shortening the lead time to an im-proved or updated version, thereby providing a competitive edge.

M2M communications are made possible by the use of intelligent sensors or micro-processors that are embedded in the remote asset. These sensors include a SIM card that is able to receive and transmit data wirelessly to a central server where it can be analysed and acted upon.

Wireless communications technologies used to enable this connectivity include GSM, GPRS, EDMA, 3G, LTE, or WiFi and WiMAX. Some of these connections occur over a relatively short range, some over a distance of many miles.

Source: Vodafone Global Enterprise white paper, ‘Global Machine to Machine Communication’Find this white paper at: http://tinyurl.com/2cbmgkb

m2m at a glance

I’m fine, thanks. And how are you?

© Il

lust

ratio

n W

orks

/ A

lam

y

solar panels and wind generators to be fed into the national network. They will also play a big part in re-ducing CO2 emissions.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the en-ergy regulator Ofgem published their requirements for smart meters in July 2010. In response to industry pres-sure, the government bought forward its original ten-year timetable by two years, allowing energy companies to begin installing meters immediately (see case study on British Gas).

Meanwhile, the government plans to work with energy companies to develop standards and set up a cen-tral data management and com-munications body to coordinate the transfer of smart metering data.

ON ThE mOvEFleet owners have long used M2M technology to track vehicles, collect data from them and manage servic-ing and repairs. Car leasing com-pany ALD Automotive has installed telematics (as M2M applications are known in the automotive industry) in over 20,000 company cars and light commercial vehicles. The firm’s in-car system - ProFleet2 - was originally in-troduced six years ago to remind driv-ers to service their vehicles on time and make service booking easier.

Since then, the system has been up-graded to record information about when and how far a vehicle has been driven, as well as information about its speed, acceleration and braking on any given journey. The data is re-layed to fleet owners via a system de-veloped by British company Airmax and is used to compile data on how a vehicle has been operated.

This information is used to reduce fleet costs by monitoring employees’ use of their cars and negotiating lower insurance rates. More accurate record-keeping ensures that cars are better maintained and keep their value longer.

“Industry data suggests that in-vehicle telematics can produce fuel savings of up to 20 per cent through better driving; a 15 per cent reduc-tion in overtime claims and insur-ance premium savings of up to 30 per cent,” says David Yates, market-ing director of ALD Automotive.

“Over £1 milion worth of vehicles has been recovered in the last two years using the system’s vehicle loca-tion functionality following vehicle theft. We have also seen business mile-age claims fall significantly, with one company recently reporting a £90,000 fall in business mileage claims as a di-rect result of using the business mile-age capture feature within the system.”

A hEAlThY OUTlOOK?Medical applications of M2M are an-other area where proponents see rich pickings. US doctors already routinely using sensors to track the heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs of patients who are considered ‘at risk’.

In the UK, the NHS has been slower to adopt the technology. However, the savings in collecting and processing information more rapidly and making scarce medical skills more widely available could be considerable.

Broomwell Health is a telemedi-cine company that collects and processes readings from patients with heart problems. Around 1,000 electrocardiograms (ECGs) per week in north-west England are collected by skilled nurses and transmitted to the company’s processing centre. Twelve different sensors are connected to a patient from an ECG device that the com-pany calls a ‘stethoscope for the chest’. Data can be processed in five minutes and the results sent back to a physician in a PDF format.

“Normally, a patient would be sent to an outpatient department and would have to wait for the re-sults,” says Joshua Rowe, chairman of Broomwell Health. “There are massive financial savings to be made: normally it costs £155 to carry out an ECG. This way the cost is £21.”

Rowe’s company also moni-tors patients with suspected ar-rhythmia (irregular heartbeat) by means of a wrist watch-style cuff, which gathers data while a patient is going about their daily routine. The patient presses the device when a palpitation occurs and the data is later downloaded for processing. According to Rowe, arrhythmia patients usually have to be observed for 24 hours in hospital and wait for four to six weeks for the results of their tests.

For now, organisations that adopt M2M must solve issues such as how to connect to different networks and the security of sensitive data for themselves. The result is that most projects are developed from scratch.

In the longer term, M2M will have a major impact on the way people work, whether it is by freeing company car drivers from the drudgery of filling in their mileage reports, giving doctors up-to-the-minute information on the health of their patients or making meter-reading a thing of the past.

British Gas stole a march on the rest of the energy industry earlier this year by announcing a plan to begin work on an M2M smart metering network for its 16 million customers.

The company signed a contract with Vodafone UK to provide network connections and to encrypt and send data from almost one million households as part of a trial of smart meters that will take place over the next two years.

“There is a lot of hype about M2M, but smart metering is something that is real, now: we have already installed 135,000 SIM cards,” says Petter Allison, director for Smart Metering for British Gas. “Smart meters help customers become far more aware of the amount and cost of energy they use, which encour-ages people to reduce their usage and save money,” he adds.

A cross-section of British Gas customers will have their homes fitted with Zigbee network technology to connect their smart meters to an in-home monitor which will display information from the smart meter, such as the day’s energy use. Meters will send readings to British Gas via the GSM [Global System for Mobile communications] network, rather than having them col-lected by human meter readers.

“Smart meters will save us money in terms of processing data and the costs of looking after the customer. All our internal processes will become much cheaper,” says Allison. “But it is not only a positive business case for the suppliers. There are two other benefits: customers will be able to manage their en-ergy better and utility companies will be able to manage their energy networks better.”

For the trial, British Gas has developed ‘traffic light’ style dis-plays that indicate the amount of energy a customer is using at any given time, how much they are spending and the amount of CO2 they are generating. The company plans to develop a variety of displays with different levels of complexity. Custom-ers will also be able to download data from displays to their home computers so that they can monitor and control appli-ances such as boilers. British Gas plans to help customers set up these home networks.

“In the long term, smart metering does present a real op-portunity,” says Peter Kelly, enterprise director at Vodafone UK. “But it is not just about providing M2M, but lots of new value-added services as well, such as using your smartphone to switch appliances in the home on or off, to control your heating or to tell you where the nearest charging point is for your electric car.”

Large corporate customers already get half hourly bills, but M2M technology will bring that level of control to household us-ers. M2M will allow network companies that generate electricity to incentivise customers not to consume heavily at peak periods.

They will also get a better picture of when and how elec-tricity is consumed and be able to charge a variety of tariffs. For example, electric car owners may be allocated specific charging times, paying much higher rates to recharge out-side their allocated slots.

Standards will play an important part in ensuring the suc-cess of smart metering. British Gas has taken the unusual step of publishing its technical specifications in the hope that other companies will adopt them. “We want to pro-mote a level of interoperability by encouraging others to apply our open standards,” explains Allison.


Case study: british gas

Peter Kelly, vodafone:

Most of our research tells us that the two big growth markets are first transportation and logistics and second smart metering

Number of connections according to monitoring use in Western Europe (millions)

n Cellular connected buildings n Meters with cellular connection n Telematics and in vehicle applications n Other

Source: Juniper Research

100

90

80

70

60

50

40

30

20

10

0

2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

The future of m2m

9,500 British Gas engineers are closer to their customers with Vodafone’s secure remote connectivityvodafone.co.uk/totalcomms

24084_VF_GasEngineer_TimesAd_338x264_AW_v1.indd 1 17/9/10 09:35:55

this supplement is an independent publication from raconteur … · 2019-06-18 · orative tools,...

Documents