Enterprise Mobility - a way to deal with economic downturn

A way to navigate your business through economic downturn

by Purushottam Darshankar

Economic downturn is a reality and there is no escape from reality of economic crisis, as we see businesses across the world facing a recession. It calls for an action and innovation to successfully navigate through economic downturn. While economic downturn creates formidable obstacles to businesses that are trying to survive and grow, an economic downturn can open up opportunities. The key is to focus on your core competencies, reduce operating expenses and manage more proactively, rather than reactively. In order to reduce operational expenses, one needs to improve the productivity through increased efficiency. How can businesses provide more services per person at lower administrative costs and reduce expenses while at the same time providing quality work and good customer services?

A broad economic downturn forces companies to seek new sources of improving productivity while leveraging existing investment in IT. Proper Enterprise mobility initiative that is consistent with the overall stated corporate objectives can bring in required transformation for businesses. They can use enterprise mobility to develop more productive business process while maintaining budget discipline. The significant impact of enterprise mobility could be felt in field service automation. Some of the following business initiatives would be of significant importance for businesses during economic downturn.

To be more productive and effective, make available all the required backend enterprise data (work order information, product information etc.), user manuals, trouble shooting manuals to remote service technician at jobsite to minimize on communication cost, wasting time and excess fuel driving back and forth to the office.

The poor scheduling and routing is another area that can be looked upon. Location intelligence of service people could enable businesses to improvise on their decision support, operation and planning. Planning and scheduling of work could be done based upon the location, parts and expertise needed. Sending service technicians to a distant location, when another service technician is closer and ready to take up a task leads to wastage of time and fuel. Can you use GPS tracking on the vans to better know the location of all service technicians so you can dispatch the closest and best service technician for the job? Use of Location aware field force automation solution would dispatch the right work orders to field technicians on their handhelds that can improvise your productivity, operational efficiency and better customer satisfaction.

Tight control over inventory is another important area. Improvise on visibility of parts needed, the location of inventory and parts used in each of the service ticket. GIS integration with inventory management system can help improvise the utilization of spares stored and managed from across the different locations.

Poor Cash collection and management at jobsite can be further improved using POS based handheld devices. You can collect money, swipe credit cards and print receipts from handheld device. You can reduce wastage of time, paper and avoid postage expenses and sending out invoices weeks after the work was completed.

The administrative costs can be brought down by automating work order scheduling and dispatching using enterprise mobility solution that reduces cost of data entry and administrative staff. The management visibility into the work done in the field is essential to ensure quality of services and customer satisfaction.

Slow economic time motives each of us to be smarter and more efficient. There is growing demand of enterprise mobility solution as a service ( SaaS model)- “on Demand” service. The entire functionality bundles could be delivered as services hosted by independent service provider. Business users of these plug-and-play offerings would pay a monthly fee and in turn be able to demand quality of service. For business, not only the TCO (Total cost of ownership) is low but the ROI (return on the investment) is also quickly realized and quantifiable.

Device Selection for Enterprise Mobility solution

How to zero in on target device for your enterprise mobility solution ?

by Purushottam Darshankar

One of the most critical part of enterprise mobility solution is the selection of appropriate commercial or ruggedized mobile device. Inevitably the environment in which the devices would be used should drive this decision; however, there is trend of deploying commercial grade devices in traditional rugged markets. Leading factors driving the selection of commercial over ruggedized device include, among others, the lower upfront investment, access to more current technology and short replacement requirements.

Though the TCO (Total Cost of ownership) is low with commercial grade devices, the ruggedized devices provide superior cost profile to commercial grade solution in select environments. For example, in harsh field environments such as accident sites, property damage sites, supply chain/transportation and public safety, the annual TCO of a mobile rugged device is as much as 35 percent lower than for non-rugged devices.

On average, 4 percent of rugged mobile computers installed to support enterprise mobility applications in “harsh” environments fail per year. Conversely, the annual failure rate for commercial grade devices in similar harsh environments rockets to 36 percent. End users need to anticipate device failure rates into their deployment plan. The critical issue is effectively managing failure rate and downtime to minimize impact on the operation.

Handheld Mobile or Tablet PC?

The key to choose between the two is whether or not the user has to work while standing or walking around. A mobile has a significant advantage over a tablet PC by being able to be used while the user is truly mobile. When a pen tablet is used at a desk in a mini-dock, its capability is essentially identical to that of an ultra-portable notebook.

There are two types of Tablet PCs: slates and convertibles. A slate-style device is in essence an LCD with a built-in PC motherboard and hard drive. This type of Tablet PC is most frequently used by health-care workers and others in specialized fields. A convertible device can be used like a slate or, when the screen is swiveled and raised, like a traditional notebook with a keyboard. The display lays on top of the keyboard when it is used in slate mode.

Being able to write on the Tablet PC's screen with a stylus--which works like the Graffiti handwriting recognition on a Palm OS device--makes "all the difference”. While at a home site, user uses the Tablet PC's pen-based input to fill in forms and add drawings to digital photographs that he takes during inspections. At the office, he plugs the Tablet PC into its docking station, which connects it to an external monitor and keyboard that lets him use the computer as he would a desktop PC.

However, with mobile devices becoming more and more sophisticated, they certainly bring advantages when it comes to harsh field environment such as accident sites, property damage sites. They are much handier and are always connected. Few of the points where mobile can score over table PC are

- Cost of Mobile device based on its capability can be lower than tablet PC cost and may be important factor if it has to be rolled out on massive scale.
- Besides Data, use of Voice or SMS services used from mobile device may become user friendly & time saving.
- Inbuilt camera feature of Mobile which will enable field force person to capture various field details in seconds for select applications.
- SFA/FFA Mobile Applications supported by GPS & Navigation will increase the Field employee’s performance by assisting him for better route optimization.

Device Platform

The next important consideration is device platform. Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform and Research in Motion's (RIM) Blackberry have emerged to dominate the landscape of enterprise mobility. While Blackberry devices are generally used more prevalently for mobile messaging, Windows mobile devices are better positioned for an expanded suite of mobilized enterprise applications.

From a device selection perspective, it might be considered beneficial to have the bundled applications, such as web-browsing and email, Pocket word, excel etc. The Windows Mobile platform offers a more consistent experience between devices.

Wireless Connectivity options

Connectivity options play an important role in device selection. Some of the enterprise application provides offline functionalities and need to synchronies large data once the connectivity is made available. Choices range from very limited connectivity in the base models to highly connectable devices at the top end. Within each class of device already outlined, i.e. rugged, commercial, Pocket PC, RIM etc, the full range of connectivity options are available.

Connectivity options include Infra-red, Serial Connection, Bluetooth, WiFi, GPRS etc.

Practically all models will have an infra-red and serial connection available. The serial connection may be via cable or via cradle. Bluetooth may be useful for connecting with a mobile phone, headset, or some other personal devices. When used with a mobile phone, Bluetooth can be used for remote data synchronization.

WiFi connectivity is useful in a controlled environment, such as a warehouse, that can be fully covered by wireless access points. This method offers cheap, reliable, and fast synchronization.

A packet-switched network such as GPRS, that offers “always-on” functionality may connect to a static IP address at the synchronisation gateway, or again through a VPN, thus offering better security. It is important to note that it is possible for synchronisation to occur without the need for any wireless connectivity. Users may simply connect via a cable or a cradle hosted by a computer that has a connection to the synchronisation gateway.

Peripheral Device support

The selected device may require built in functionality to support the peripheral devices such as Barcode scanners, Printers, GPS receivers, Cameras, Magnetic stripe readers, RFID readers etc. The SDIO slot, Compact Flash slots, or other expansion slots may be used either for memory expansion or for connecting the peripheral device.

QWERTY Keyboard or Stylus input

Device may feature the keyboard and/or stylus for entering data. Keyboards may be numeric or complete QWERTY. Some devices offer handwriting recognition and transcription as an alternative.

The choice between an actual keyboard and stylus input depends a lot on the design of the user interface for the enterprise mobile application. Application user interfaces should tend towards using drop-down lists or numeric-only fields, in place for simple text-entry fields. If there are a great number of text-entry fields appearing in the application, then an actual keyboard might be preferable.

Battery life

Battery life depends on the battery technology and on the quality of the battery itself. How long device would function between battery recharges will depend on the typical usage patterns of the device. Heavy consumers of battery power are the device backlight, and radio circuitry. Any device running Bluetooth, WLAN, or a mobile phone will require a radio to be operating in the device. Of these, Bluetooth is the lightest consumer of power, due to its short range. It is important to consider what will happen to a device, should the battery become fully exhausted.

Some devices offer a back-up battery. In this case, when the main battery has been completely drained, a message is displayed to the user, telling them that the back-up battery is now being used. In this way, no data is lost, and the user is advised to recharge the main battery as soon as possible.

If all battery power for the device fails, then normally the data and even the applications in the device memory would be lost. However, some vendors offer non-volatile memory. This type of memory retains its data when power is lost, and remains intact during even a hard reset. Some devices will feature this type of memory internally.

Another way of keeping data beyond power loss is to save it on SD memory cards. Applications may access the card just like another folder.

The other considerations for device selection include size, weight, accessories, and even button placement on the device. This area is often underestimated in how important it can be in the overall success of a mobile solution.

By taking into consideration all of the factors discussed here, it should be possible to arrive at a shortlist of devices that are suited to a particular mobile solution. Lastly, Don’t forget to lab test the short listed device using a prototype of the enterprise mobile application.

Evolving security needs for Enterprise Mobility

Enterprise Mobility Solution– How secure are they?

by Purushottam Darshankar

In today’s marketplace, enterprise mobile solutions have become necessary for businesses as competitive advantage and as a productivity improvement tool. With traditional low end monochrome devices giving way to sleeker high resolution handset packed with high processing power and high memory, the enterprises have started using these devices beyond voice calls and SMS and focus on delivering the critical front-end application for mobile workers.

Safety and security are of paramount concern for any enterprise in an increasingly uncertain and unsafe world, and have both a financial return in terms of cost of avoidance towards lost time, litigation and compensation, regulatory compliance, repair cost etc. as safety improves and intangible benefits related to improved working conditions for the workforce.

The wireless medium through cellular network has certain limitation over the wired medium such as open access, limited bandwidth and system complexity. These limitations make it difficult although possible to provide security features such as authentication, encryption, integrity and confidentiality. Since the communication is on the wireless channel, there is no physical barrier that can separate the attacker from the network. The principal sources of attack could be either end terminals or operator’s own backbone network. Issues may arise in mobile device OS which might open security holes that can be exploited. If a device is stolen or lost, it needs to be protected from unauthorized access to confidential and sensitive information such as enterprise data, e-mails, contacts etc.

Due to open access to cellular network and in turn to enterprise IT system, there are variety of attacks the infrastructure is open to. Denial of Service (DOS) is most potent attack that can bring down the infrastructure network, caused by sending excessive data to network, more than the network can handle, resulting in users being unable to access the network resources. Unauthorized access, if proper method of authentication is not implemented, provides free access to attacker to enterprise IT system and can use it for services that he might not be authorized for.

If data communication between handheld device and backend server is not encrypted then the attacker can eavesdrop and intercept sensitive communication such as e-mails, documents, other critical enterprise data etc. The attacker can sit in between the handheld device and access station of cellular network to intercept the message in between and change them. Going further, the attacker can hijack an already established session, and can act as legitimate user to gain the access to enterprise IT system.

While there are several security mechanisms available in Wireless network, continued research is going on to provide new and even more secure mechanism for cellular security as we look forward to 4G next generation services.

Enterprise Security Strategies

Every enterprise should have a security strategy to protect the availability, integrity and confidentiality of data in an enterprise’s IT system. Organization needs to decide on how much time, money and efforts need to be spent in order to develop appropriate security policies and control. Listing the threats helps the security team to identify the various methods, tools, and techniques that are used in an attack and can then develop proactive as well as reactive strategy.

The proactive or pre-attack strategy is a set of steps taken to minimize existing security policy vulnerabilities and develop contingency plans. Determining the amount of damage that an attack will cause on an IT system and the weaknesses and vulnerabilities exploited during this attack helps in developing the proactive strategy.

The reactive strategy or post-attack strategy helps security team to assess the damage caused by the attack, repair the damage or implement the contingency plan developed in the proactive strategy, document and learn from the experience, and get business functions running as soon as possible.

Enterprise Security Goals

The enterprise mobile solutions that run on the handheld devices are developed by independent software vendors that distribute these as freeware or license ware. The IP address of the servers which hosts these applications, for user download, are advertised so that they can be accessed by the intended users. However, it can be downloaded by any consumer over-the-air on the device without any control by operator. This may become a launching pad for attack on operator network as well as enterprise’s IT system.

Every enterprise mobile solution must provide a bundle of security functions that assure the security of system and can be referred as the goals of security system.

• Authentication - Before the data is being exchanged between the receiver and sender, their identity must be verified.
  
• Secrecy or Confidentiality-Only authenticated users based on their privileges should be able to access and interpret the data.
  
• Integrity - Data being communicated is assured to be free from any type of modification between the end points (sender and receiver).
  
• Non-repudiation- will ensure that neither the sender nor the receiver can falsely deny that they have sent certain data.
  
• Service Reliability- Since the systems usually get attacked by intruder, which may affect it availability. The IT system should be robust enough to provide a way to grant their users the quality of service they expect.
  

Most of the mobile middleware’s available in the market provides the secure connectivity between handheld and backend server that supports HTTPS connection. The OMA device management specification suggests the use of client credentials (ID, Password and nonce) and server credential to confirm the authenticity and integrity of data being exchanged. Additional encryption algorithms (DES, AES or RC4) could be used to secure the data between sender and receiver by using either symmetric or asymmetric encryption. However these techniques slow down the enterprise application performance and balance has to be struck between security and usability.

The enterprise should ensure the proper end user registration and enrollment procedure to allow access to enterprise services. The end-users need to initially authenticate through a self-service registration web portal using their username and password credentials. Once authenticated, users are provisioned for enterprise application and are provided with a pin code that is used during the download of the enterprise application from the device browser. In addition, the firewall and IDP (intrusion detection and prevention) system can be used to tackle the security threats.

Enterprises must develop a security strategy and build policy that reflects this strategy. Security must be the responsibility of the entire user community and appropriate communication needs to be put in place to emphasize its importance. The expansion of mobile devices such as PDA’s, phones, and converged devices into the enterprise present several challenges to IT managers regarding security and manageability. A balance of security and usability must be reached considering the limited processing power of handheld devices.

Mobile Web Next Big Thing- Are you ready for it?

Making your web site ready for Mobile web
by Purushottam Darshankar

Market researchers have already speculated that mobile web will become next dominant internet platform and is referred to as next wave of fueling m-business.
The Google, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have already realized potential and have come up with mobile portal featuring content designed specifically for mobile devices.

Peoples have started to regard their mobile phone as gateway to the web – a means of accessing the information they previously only got through desktop browser. With an estimated 250 million US mobile subscriber, Juniper Research reports at least 10 % of them browsing internet through their mobile phones. The web based social networks such as Facebook and Flickr offers pervasive use of mobile phones by young consumers.

Though the mobile web is going to be next big thing, it has its own challenges when it comes to user adaptability. The W3C, the leading consortium also has realized this, Tim Berner says while announcing the launch of MWI (Mobile Web Initiative), “The Mobile Web Initiative's goal is to make browsing the Web from mobile devices a reality,W3C and mobile industry leaders are working together to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater Web.”

The carrier networks are very slow and when it comes to accessing improperly designed mobile website, the users are getting impatient waiting for sites to load. Most of the sites, that are technologically capable of sensing when they are being loaded by a mobile browser, claim to deliver web site content optimized for mobile use however are not formatted properly for small screen.

The users are well adapted to Windows environment and find it difficult accessing mobile web which allows only one page to be displayed at a time, and pages can only be viewed in the sequence they were originally accessed. Though the use of mobile device in future is promising, the limitation of human eye sight, hand size and device screen size will make user to prefer desktop over mobile phone for select category of operations.

Knowing the screen size may help to optimize the content, however it is best to keep the shape and style to minimal and linear as possible knowing the fact that mobile world contains craziest screen variations. The mobile sites flooded with advertisement slow down the page loading and also fill up screen unnecessarily making website sub-standard.

The lack of consistency across multiple browsers is another pain area and testing mobile web site on devices has become a nightmare, with more than 40 plus mobile browser available in the market.

High end phones Vs low end phones

Low end phones have several limitations, including screen resolution and limited XHTML rendering capability of browser. If the majority of your target audience lies in this category it is advised to develop the mobile web site using WML(Wireless Markup Language).

On the other hand the high end phones (including Smartphone and PDA’s) have ability to run the website that is comparable to one you might run on desktop IE browser.

This may inspire the business to come up with one web that means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of device they are using. This may fail to deliver in providing optimized experience to mobile user. While device may be capable of rendering full, traditional web page design, sending them the normal version is not a best practice as content has to go over carrier network, which is much slower.

Creating a separate domain for mobile users is advised even though the user agent detection would provide us to detect if the user is using a mobile device or a desktop browser. The advantage of this is that the user browsing with high end device would be provided with option of using the traditional web site or mobile web site.

Design Considerations for Mobile Web

In early days only way to access mobile web site was through WAP browser which used to support WML as primary markup language. WML was based on card-and-deck metaphor. This card-based metaphor means all user interactions are split into cards and navigation occurs between cards within a deck. The WML is still used by legacy systems that are supporting low end phones. The WAP gateway enables connecting of mobile devices to web servers.

With advancement of mobile technologies, most built in browsers these days support XHTML-MP (Mobile Profile), the standard designed specifically for mobile devices. cHTML is another standard developed by Japanese mobile manufacturers to support DoCoMo’s i-Mode phones.

XHTML-MP consist fewer elements (Structure ,Texts ,Hypertext ,List ,Forms ,Basic Tables ,Image ,Object Metainformation ,Scripting ,Style Sheet ,Style Attribute ,Link ,Base) and also tighter restriction to enable device browser to handle the web content. Practically all the devices sold today support XHTML. The doctype for XHTML-MP site would begin like

You can visit site like http://flickr.com/mob or http://mobile.fandango.com and can look at XHTML-MP coding.

User experience is next important thing and developer should provide easy navigation by providing necessary links to go to top of the page, home page and link to skip the menu and go directly to the content. The long text on mobile website can be painful experience as user will have to do lot of vertical and horizontal scrolling. CSS can be effectively used to knock off certain text. Use of declaration like .handheldHide {display :none} in handheld stylesheet is enough to filter the content.

Use of few images that too of smaller size is preferred that too in JPEG or GIF format that have high compression ratio. PNG images can be further compressed using OptiPNG tool.

Even though some of browsers support Javascript (IE, NetFront, OPenWave) to some degree, use of it should be restricted as debugging of Javascript is difficult.

Tools and Resources

In order to know the shortcomings of different browsers for different standards one can make use of some of the resources mentioned herein.

To test the support of your browser to XHTML and CSS styling you can access http://cameronmoll.com/articles/mobile/mkp/ . The “advanced” page of this site even tests the support of Javascript by browser.

To determine how your device interprets handheld stylesheet you can visit http://htmldog.com/test/handheld.html url from your device.

One can test their own mobile web site to see if it is ready for mobile user on emulator provided at http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php. This site can also be used by developer in checking and validating their markup language.

Different mobile browsers, their capability and on how do they handle real web pages is well explained at http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/operaStuff/devices/. The site concludes with best browser, which has low resource usage and small footprint, that is Opera.

The browser capabilities have improved much over the past years and almost all of them have a good support for XHTML. However for optimized experience for mobile user’s one need to design the mobile specific site. To support low end phones one will have to provide both versions of website viz. XHTML-MP and WML. Concept of having one site to force-feed the same content as that displayed on the traditional site without considering different needs and requirements of mobile device could lead to disaster.

The Star Thrower Story

The Star Thrower Story
- by Joel Barker
There's a story I would like to share with you. It was inspired by the writing of Loren Eiseley. Eiseley was a very special person because he combined the best of two cultures. He was a scientist and a poet. And from those two perspectives he wrote insightfully and beautifully about the world and our role in it.

Once upon a time, there was a wise man, much like Eiseley himself, who used to go to the ocean to do his writing. He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work. One day he was walking along the shore. As he looked down the beach, he saw a human figure moving like a dancer. He smiled to himself to think of someone who would dance to the day. So he began to walk faster to catch up.

As he got closer, he saw that it was a young man and the young man wasn't dancing, but instead he was reaching down to the shore, picking up something and very gently throwing it into the ocean.As he got closer, he called out, "Good morning! What are you doing?" The young man paused, looked up and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."

"I guess I should have asked, Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?"

"The sun is up and the tide is going out. And if I don't throw them in they'll die."

"But young man, don't you realize that there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it. You can't possibly make a difference!"

The young man listened politely. Then bent down, picked up another starfish and threw it into the sea, past the breaking waves. "It made a difference for that one!"

His response surprised the man. He was upset. He didn't know how to reply. So instead, he turned away and walked back to the cottage to begin his writings.

All day long as he wrote, the image of the young man haunted him. He tried to ignore it, but the vision persisted. Finally, late in the afternoon he realized that he the scientist, he the poet, had missed out on the essential nature of the young man's actions. Because he realized that what the young man was doing was choosing not to be an observer in the universe and make a difference. He was embarrassed.

That night he went to bed troubled. When the morning came he awoke knowing that he had to do something. So he got up, put on his clothes, went to the beach and found the young man. And with him he spent the rest of the morning throwing starfish into the ocean. You see, what that young man's actions represent is something that is special in each and everyone of us. We have all been gifted with the ability to make a difference. And if we can, like that young man, become aware of that gift, we gain through the strength of our vision the power to shape the future.And that is your challenge.

And that is my challenge. We must each find our starfish. And if we throw our stars wisely and well, it will propel our Organization along, in our journey to excellence………..