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Get
Smart About Email
From pricing plans to partial rollouts, new options
make it a good time to rethink your mobile email strategy.
September 2006
By Craig Settles
At
first blush, many business executives may not think much about the need for
an email deployment strategy for mobile workers. There are mobile devices in
abundance at management meetings and on executive retreats, in airports and
on commuter trains. And of course, everyone in the company has an email
account.
Is
there really wireless email everywhere, though? More importantly, do you want
all of your mobile workers to have wireless access to their email?
“Less
than 10 percent of business email has been fully mobilized,” says Jim Judge,
a principal of Cambridge Consulting Solutions, a technology marketing
consultancy. “Only in certain functional areas, such as field engineering and
sales, do you see larger penetrations. Many mobile workers use remote
hotspots or their hotel rooms to get access to their email.”
David
Heit, senior product manager at RIM, concurs.
“There are market segments that don’t use email, or even require an account:
field service workers responding to job tickets, truck drivers receiving
their schedules, orderlies, nurses and doctors. Most police officers don’t
have unique email—they share devices. Mobile communication is important, but
email is not a big factor.”
Could this low penetration be attributed not to a lack of need but to the
fact that organizations are unwilling to give all mobile workers wireless
email because of price, particularly among smaller businesses and government
entities? Philadelphia CIO Dianah Neff states that,
“Right now we pay for cellular wireless for a number of field workers to
access data, such as those in public safety, building inspectors, health
inspectors and social workers. It costs $70 per employee per month. Because
of this we have limited the number of people who have access.”
With
municipal wireless projects such as Philadelphia’s
driving down the price of carriers’ data services, now is a good time to
re-visit the price issue to see if wireless email is more affordable. That
said GramE, you can still see an increasing need when you
consider that over the years people have changed the way they use email.
“Email
now is almost like wireless instant messaging (IM),” states Steve McDonald,
CIO of OptimusSolutions, a technology consulting
firm. “Two years ago I’d send an email from a laptop to a vendor and it would
be really in-depth because I wanted to give as much information as possible
to the person. Now I send a one-sentence question and expect to get a
response quickly.”
Look
at how your mobile workforce operates. Are there increasing numbers of people
who need to communicate in quick bursts? Can productivity increase noticeably
with this capability? There may be 101 daily operational issues that can be
resolved with quick email exchanges both within your organization and with
numerous outside parties.
Removing
the Security Barrier to Increasing Email Adoption
Ben Gibson, director of wireless and mobility marketing for Cisco,
observes that, “Some industries are very conservative in terms of security,
such as insurance and other financial services companies. So IT is having
workers use docking stations for PDAs or laptops
connected to dedicated lines.”
The
logical course of action here is to increase the steps that are taken to
protect access to the network, such as using a top-notch VPN (virtual private
network) application. Organizations also must take into account that many
mobile workers are not “technology sophisticated” and often work in
situations where they have to connect quickly, upload or download what they
need and then move on to the next project, customer visit, etc.
“Security
needs to be more simplistic to be used by individuals and more uniform in its
use across the various types of mobile devices,” continues Gibson. “You can’t
get workers to take proper security measures if they have to go through
multiple steps.” Your success in this regard will depend heavily on the
vendors you select.
Cisco,
for one, provides equipment and a platform that facilitates workers’ mobile
email access from many locations, whether from
coffee shop hotspots, access points in homes or other options with a focus on
simplicity, uniformity and scalability. Companies such as Intellisync
and Good Technology are well established at providing applications that
tackle the security and remote device management part of any email strategy
plan.
Developing Trends that Can Influence Strategy
Steve McDonald’s comment about wireless email being similar to IM begs the
question: Will IM software become a replacement for
email?
RIM
has dedicated IM capabilities on its newer devices, but the company doesn’t
feel IM will replace email. Heit states, “The
problem with IM is that for a long time [it was] consumer oriented. Workers
were using it inside the organization, but IT realized that there was little
control of information security and banned IM. This led to IM products and
services with complete audit and control features specifically for
corporations. However, it’s relatively young in IM’s maturity cycle, so
adoption is still slow.”
WebMessenger
is in the IM business and it, too, sees IM as only a supplement to email.
“Presence [knowing who is and isn’t on the network and available to talk] is
going to have the biggest impact, enabling instant text and voice
communication,” says Joe Naylor, the company’s chief marketing officer. “It’s
not going to replace email, because there’s a need for more formal
communication. But for quick productivity-enhancing, time-saving messaging,
IM is very popular.”
Hosted
email applications are also becoming popular. Judge notes that “large and
small enterprises are using hosted email, though the faster growth is in
small and medium-sized companies that do not have the internal infrastructure
such as Microsoft Exchange and IBM Notes.”
“These are
definitely the target,” adds Naylor. “All a person has to do is go to the
Web, download mobile client software and pay either a monthly or annual fee.
At a later point the user can put in a regular email server behind the
organization’s firewall.”
As you look at the changing landscape of
mobile workers and how they are doing their jobs, it’s certainly time to
carefully examine your email strategy, or create a plan if one is not in
place. Just because everyone has email doesn’t mean your mobile workers are
getting the most that email has to offer.
Craig Settles is president of
Successful.com and the author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal
Wireless.
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