Wireless Business Applications

Helping staff learn wireless applications

How do you get mobile staff to embrace new mobile devices and wireless software?

Some mobile staff commonly resist moving from paper to wireless applications – particularly if they are not regular desktop computer users. This resistance can be overt, or more perniciously, covert. We have regularly encountered situations where a field staff member insists the device is not working but it works when other people use it and the server logs show that it is working correctly. Furthermore, we have examples where people later admitted that they had intentionally tried to sabotage the application.

One of our customers had an excellent idea. He requires his staff to get checked out on the device. After training and a few days in the field, the field staffer needs to demonstrate competence on the device – completing standard tasks along with routine restart and error recovery.

Once competence has been demonstrated, the staffer gets a free day off.

Both parts of this idea are good:

1. Have the staffer demonstrate to someone else that they know what they are doing. This is a step beyond sitting in a training class and shows they really know what they are doing.

2. Provide a reward for the effort.

Wireless and Hurricane Wilma

My company JumpStart Wireless, located in South Florida, has been dealing with the destruction of Hurricane Wilma. We've survived nicely with our co-located servers, our ASP office software, and offsite programmers.

Unfortunately, many of our business colleagues have 100s of staff idle because their wired communication infrastructure is completely down. They now want to know how fast we can implement a wireless application.

Don't wait for a disaster - now is the time to replace your wired communciation infrastructure with wireless.

Here are the results from this week in Florida:

Most reliable communciation services: wireless email and applications. Definitely some delays, but smooth, mostly seamless operation, even during the peak of the storm.

Much less reliable: wireless voice. We commonly do not reach people, calls placed move to voicemail without ever ringing the handset, and calls need to be placed 5-10 times to actually get an outside line.

Totally unreliable: wired lines.

Bonar's Rule of Wireless Business Software

The first day of wireless business software usage by real users will teach you more than a year of careful study and analysis.

Why wireless applications are by necessity customizable

a guest entry from Jim Chard

Customizable applications mean that applications are not only dynamic, changing with the company’s business needs, but that the cost of maintaining and enhancing the applications is driven down because customizing is accomplished office admin staff rather than expensive programmers and systems integrators.

Each corporate customer is unique and, recognizing its uniqueness, will refuse to adopt a shrink wrapped, one-size-fits-all solution. Even in homogeneous sectors like banking, standard procedures are conducted in very different ways. In order to convince field managers to change their current practices and give up paper, companies and wireless software vendors will need to tailor wireless solutions to the unique, specific needs of field operations.

Wireless is the most recent cycle of personalized computing power. Each evolutionary cycle of computer development from mainframe to mini to client server to handheld has manifested a closer and more personal relationship between device and user. An increasingly personal relationship demands continual change and customization of the application and the interface presented to the user.

Wireless applications allow companies to become real time processing entities. Real time in turn allows companies to rapidly evolve to meet changing competitive, economic, and global changes. The rapidly mutating corporation, changing to meet these demands, will of necessity need to alter its business processes on a highly accelerated scale. No place will this be more true than among mobile workers in the field. Their wireless applications and tools will need to change and adapt just as their corporation is changing. Static applications will rapidly obsolesce. Only if the applications are customizable, changeable, and malleable will field operations be able to keep pace with the changes in their companies.

As the price of devices and over-the-air transport are driven down, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will also be reduced accordingly. In a scenario where devices cost $50-150 and monthly data plans hover around $20/month, it is improbable that software will be priced any differently. In order for software to be priced appropriately and at the same time flexible enough to meet changing corporate conditions, wireless software needs to be customizable by its very nature. A forms-based approach which can be changed on the fly without programming would appear to be a necessity in such an environment.

 

Choosing between the Radio Shack TRS 80 (BlackBerry) and Commadore PET (Treo)

I recently was called by a friend who asked me whether I thought he should buy a BlackBerry or a Treo for his next phone. I laughed and reminded him how utterly early we are in the market for mobile devices. Which was better, I asked, the Radio Shack TRS 80 or the Commadore PET? The real answer to his question is that no matter which device he buys, both will be hopelessly obsolete in 1 year and laughably inadequate in 3 years. Consider the details of the Radio Shack TRS 80 and Commadore PET, both early PCs that were very popular in their time. Those machines had tiny 8 bit processors (vs. current 32 bit), 64k of memory (vs. current 256,000K) and 250K of cassette tape storage (vs. 640,000K CD-RW).

We need to realize where we are with respect to these devices. Times are very early.

Keep Mobile Applications Simple

Mobile applications need to be simple, small, and straightforward. As I have said before, browsing and fancy graphical user interfaces are clumsy and confusing on small devices. Here is Bob Brewin, writing about ComputerWorld's recent Mobile & Wireless World conference:

When enterprises develop mobile and wireless applications for internal or customer use, keeping the applications simple and small is usually the best route to take, according to speakers at Computerworld's Mobile & Wireless World conference this week.

Although mobile devices can mimic most of the capabilities of a desktop computer, such as handling attachments and rich-text documents, Ralph Nichols, service program manager at Pitney Bowes Inc. in Stamford, Conn., said plain text is usually a better choice for sending data. He developed a purely text-based system for the company's 3,500 field service technicians, making it both easy to use and easy to understand, yet integrated with the company's Field Service Management system from Siebel Systems Inc. in San Mateo, Calif.

Security for Mobile Devices - article by Daniel Nasaw

The April 1 Wall Street Journal has a good overview article to practical security concerns for mobile devices. Key take home messages:

1. Passwords are a start but not sufficient.

2. Don't buy or build wireless applications where it is not possible to wipe all your data from the server.

This article appears under the "Gadgets" section. Congratulations to the Wall Street Journal for taking seriously the notion that "Gadgets" should be about more than what is the latest, coolest hardware. Shame on much of the rest of the tech world for being so in love with cool hardware that it ignores how these devices will be used by real-world businesses.

Mobilizing Applications on the Cheap

There are lots of expensive ways to mobilize a business application. In this post I suggest a way that is cheap and can be done by anyone seeking to mobilize their field staff. There is no need to hire expensive consultants, everyone can do this.

The key is studying existing paper forms -- not just the blank form, but how it is actually used in practice. These are wonders of specific and detailed information. This is where the rubber of existing business systems hits the road of real world staff out with the customer. I strongly believe that mobile applications have much to learn from the existing manual processes.

When we study paper forms at my company, JumpStart Wireless, we start by getting several existing used paper forms. We use these to work closely with our customer's staff to understand:

1. How does the data flow: which fields are filled out at the office and which are filled out at the job site. What is the right order for presenting the fields?

2. Which fields are really used. It is amazing how many fields on a typical field operations form were put there in the distant past by someone who had a good idea that never worked or is long forgotten. Employees easily ignore what doesn't work.

3. Is one form often being used in multiple ways to do different jobs. Repair jobs, for example, use different fields on the form than inspection jobs. Payroll information might be being collected off of daily work reports.

4. The processes that go around the paper forms. What happens before the person in the field sees the data? What happens after the data comes back? What happens when data is incomplete? What happens when jobs are interrupted? How do errors get fixed?

5. What is the structure and type of each data field? Which fields are variable depending on the job? Which paper form free-text-entry fields are better implemented by drop down choices?

The point is, that with a little questioning of the customer, used paper forms can tell you everything you need to know about critical data and critical work processes. Of course, the understanding from the paper form must now be made executable. Nonetheless, the hardest part is fully understanding the process you wish to mobilize. Existing paper forms are the secret to that.