COMMENT
Mobile email shows plenty of promise but will be an expensive, messy failure unless organisations display joined-up thinking, says Futurity Media's Stewart Baines.
It's hard to dispute that in 2005, mobile email went mainstream. BlackBerrys, Nokia E-series handsets, Windows Smartphones and now the Danger Hiptop are the new must-haves (and don't wants) for whole armies of sales forces, field engineers and freelancers in the creative industries.
Even the public sector is seeing the merits of extending email into the mobile arena. In fact it is placing a great deal of faith in mobile communications as a foundation for meeting e-government objectives: accountability, access to public services and reducing the cost of delivering those services.
Joined-up thinking says email in the office is useful because it sits alongside customer/client/product databases. In the field, though, email is all too often detached from the information in the office. If the two are brought together, productivity gains can be measured and business cases built. If mobile email remains a standalone application, however, it will become a burden.
Public sector organisations need to see email as the first step in their mobile data strategy. Although the project may only support email now, it should be used as a deliberate ploy to familiarise users with working on PDAs, while the plans to integrate devices with back-end systems are well underway.
On top of their email, workers need access to those confidential files and databases built up over many years of bespoke public sector IT purchasing. If a housing officer is out inspecting properties or visiting tenants, for example, he needs access to the rent account, or status of a repair and so on. If he receives an email from a tenant with some issue, all the housing officer can respond with is, "I'll deal with it when I get back to the office."
Billions of pounds have been spent on bespoke systems in countless councils, quangos and support agencies up and down the land. The cost of extending database interrogation to mobile devices will cost hundreds of millions more, particularly as the interfaces are so often proprietary. It's a scary job for any IT department but it will need to be faced sooner or later.
Access to client records and interagency collaboration are the must-have mobile data tools. Only when a social worker can use their mobile or wireless PDA to access medical or housing records while visiting a vulnerable client will mobile data really be supporting e-government - improving access, accountability and reducing the cost of delivery.
Even simple mobile email projects are not a guaranteed success. Although email is undeniably one of the most important business applications, it can also be the scourge of productivity. Extending it out of the office is unlikely to make people more effective.
For some workers, it will be an extra opportunity to avoid doing any real work. A survey carried out by Clearswift earlier this year, found that 40 per cent of UK workers spend an hour or more every day messaging friends and relatives - and IT departments proved the worst behaved, spending 17 days per year chatting with friends.
Organisations will also need to solve their spam problem before making email mobile. No mobile user wants their BlackBerry inbox to be three-quarters filled with spam and unwanted emails.
As an executive toy, email-on-the-move can be very useful. But to deploy hundreds or thousands of mobile email devices in one swoop needs to be more than useful. It needs a tangible business gain, a guaranteed return on investment within three years at the most. The danger of a poorly thought out mobile email strategy is a backlash against mobility.
Stewart Baines is a freelance journalist and director at Futurity Media.
Comments
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1. Philip Neame
I fully agree Stewart Baines' analysis. At Integral Mobile Data, we provide the tools to quickly and simply integrate mobile devices with any back-end system. But the quickest sales cycle is where prospective customers have already deployed a mobile email system, understood the advantages and limitations, and worked out for themselves the next, and potentially more productive step.
The private sector does seem more attuned to this, but still thinks in terms of mobilising specific applications, rather than the person - in other words, a packaged solution, rather than a fully mobile cross-application approach. Recently, there are signs that the Public Sector is more readily grasping the advantage of an integrated mobile strategy than their peers in the private sector. Is this a reflection that the services they provide are inherently broader and more complex?