Editors' Rating
Published: 22 Dec 2005
Of course it's in Nokia's interests to stress all the stuff you can do with mobile phones that you can't do without them. Even so, the company has a pretty good track record of sponsoring intelligent content; for several years it underwrote the mobile news site TheFeature.com, and you'd have been hard pressed to identify the editorial content as tainted in any way.
Work Goes Mobile talks about Nokia's own corporate experience -- benefits and pitfalls -- of adding mobility to its business processes. Among the benefits you'd naturally expect to hear about lurk some intriguing statistics. For example: the typical desk at Nokia is occupied less than 50 percent of the time, while the company's conference rooms are constantly overbooked and people shift their hours to collaborate with co-workers in other time zones or work from home via broadband. You can see why the company would be a candidate for FlexiSpace -- Nokia's name for hot-desking.
Much of the pressure for increased mobility comes from employees. They want to work at home. They have mobile devices they've become used to using and want to integrate them more tightly into their working lives. Or they want to shift some of their hours in order to work effectively with colleagues in other time zones or to better balance work and family. These trends, say authors Michael Lattanzi, Antti Korhonen and Vishy Gopalakrishnan, actually predated Nokia's official efforts to mobilise its workforce.
But for all sorts of reasons, businesses can't accommodate these trends without planning and thought. Letting workers bring in their own devices creates problems with security, data backup and technical support. Managers have to learn different methods of assessing performance when their employees are away from the office much of the time. As workers disperse, they become isolated and communication breaks down even within teams that have worked well together in the past. Businesses need to find virtual replacements for the office water cooler, create ways to keep their workers productive and motivated, respect privacy and promote teamwork. Some will resist the changes, and they will help.
All these issues are examined in Work Goes Mobile, along with a rational assessment of costs and business cases. In a situation where field engineers are already mobile, better technology may help them work more efficiently and improve productivity by redesigning processes (a change Nokia estimated would save its own field service operation -- 5m in the first year). The case for more stationary workers may be less clear-cut.
Obviously this book is going to be written from the standpoint that mobility is a good thing. Quite apart from Nokia's own interest in the matter (let's sell more phones!), the authors themselves were key figures in Nokia's efforts to mobilise itself. Lattanzi led the strategy effort; Korhonen was 'deeply involved in the initial vision work'; and Gopalakrishnan, before joining Nokia as a practice manager, was a mobility solutions manager for Capgemini. What manager is going to say his life's work was wasted? Still, this book includes a lot of practical advice for businesses facing the challenge of adding mobility to their operations. We could, however, have done without the gooey, glowing testimonials at the end, in which workers enthuse about how wonderful it all is.
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