The final frontier

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GHATTAS: The way forward is to facilitate the traditional office with mobility, not to cancel it entirely.

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AL HABSHI: The plan is to bring in a mobility strategy next year and give our managers more than just access to e-mail.

Making the leap towards a mobile workforce is a bold one, though there are some organisations making the move without abandoning the traditional office.

Mobility is one of those buzz words that's made the leap from marketing jargon into everyday speech. The transition was helped along by the sex appeal of enterprise toys like smartphones and laptops which make the idea more than a little appealing to employees.

Everybody likes receiving a gift and staff members will love it when the packages from a local vendor show up in the office, but amidst the graveyard of cardboard boxes and bubble wrap will come the concerns of upper management who are more interested in a return on their investment, rather than freeing a BlackBerry from its plastic prison.

The reason for this concern is rooted in the fact that a mobility strategy runs a little deeper than just handing out gadgets with a smile and a handshake. Most businesses can't escape the fact that sometimes employees need to be out on the road, particularly the sales team, and CIOs will often wake up to an inbox stuffed with conference and convention invites that really need attending.

Shanjose Netto, IT manager at the Millennium Hotel in Sharjah, knows all too well about the need business travelers have to be connected to their home office. Often guests will call up months in advance to speak directly with IT to be certain that the internet will be up and working and that there will be enough bandwidth to run their applications.

"People are coming to this country for business-related work and if the e-mail is not working, it's like they are dead," explains Netto. "You have guests tipping our existing staff a big amount because they were so happy to receive an email showing he was just paid 3 or 4 million [dollars]."

This hunger for constant connection to the office is nothing new for enterprises. The workday has evolved to the point where being off the clock never really happens. It's not an uncommon sight to see a smartphone start vibrating when dinner is on the table and it has become second nature to pick it up and quickly glance at the latest communiqué.

Given this environment, it's surprising to note that mobility is still far from being adopted wholeheartedly. Concepts like hot-desking employees, where staff only spend certain days at a desk and often share it, and generally encouraging your workforce to spend more time on the road and at home are great in theory, but if you take a stroll through your nearest office block you will notice that apart from the sales team, everyone is still at their desks and the scene looks the same as it did 30 years ago, only with different technology on desks.

For Ihab Ghattas, assistant president for the Middle East at technology and network vendor, Huawei, opting for a completely mobile office is not the best strategy because there is still a human element that needs to be considered. He believes that the way forward is to focus on facilitating the traditional office with mobility as opposed to cancelling it.

"In many cases you could run video conferencing facilities, you could run texting and messaging or whatever it is, which is great, but in my personal opinion this turns us as humans into sheep," clarifies Ghattas.

Despite highrises still being flush with traditional desk-chained workers, there are those like Saleh Mohamed Al Habshi, head of IT at the National Corporation for Tourism and Hotels in Abu Dhabi, who is leading the charge for the implementation of a mobility strategy as early as next year. The plan is to implement virtual private networks and improve the ability of the first line of management to access mobile office technologies, beyond that of simply having a BlackBerry, according to Al Habshi.

"It will make a great difference of course, especially for our project managers who now - most of the time - are on site, they're not in the office here and also for our guest-operations managers," he continues.

There are of course scenarios where the ability to access the office network is not going to be enough and physically being on the premises is unavoidable. The Millennium Hotel's Netto uses the example of hardware failure, where all the mobility and connectivity in the world is not going to be able to help you access a server that won't switch on.

"If we are facing a hardware issue that means the system is down and there is no way you can remotely come into a system that is physically down. There has to be somebody very capable of taking a decision, like the IT manager or the senior staff, who have to come here and evaluate what the issue is," outlines Netto.

Calm in a crisis

One of the larger questions that crops up during mobility discussions is whether the technology exists to effectively handle a crisis from outside the office. With all the channels of communication that are open to the modern executive, there is still something to be said for the ability to walk up to an employee and have a face-to-face chat that isn't being viewed through a flood of electrons. This will usually depend on a case-by-case basis though, as some roles may be less demanding of in-office time than others.

Stephen Fearon, vice president of CRM on demand and sales development at Oracle EMEA, personally doesn't feel the need to be in the office, but believes that with a European job where you travel a lot of the time, that is considered par for the course.

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