User talk:J panganiban MGCR331

Student Name: Jacinta A. Panganiban Student ID #260242364 Subject: MGCR 331 Saturday Morning class

How is Mobile work affecting productivity

Enterprises are today moving towards mobility. With mobile devices becoming cheaper and services more affordable, the option to go mobile is not a distant dream. Mobile smart phones and PDAs are moving towards becoming the perfect solution for all enterprise woes of connectivity and communication. They have evolved from being simple communication devices to a productivity tool for professionals on the move.

As they have greater functionality enterprise mobile devices can perform better and at a higher speeds giving professionals the edge, required to survive in the highly competitive market. They are becoming the lifeline providing them with not just connectivity, 24x7, but also the opportunity to increase productivity and build profits.

More and more applications are being loaded on these devices making them a stronger productivity options for the enterprise users. Today a professional can hold conferences, transfer data, access updates and information, all on the move through these mobile devices.

Abilities such as emailing, Web access and access to the organizations resources on the move makes it easier for the remote workers and the mobile workforce to stay in touch with the business and improved efficiency.

There has been a significant amount of convergence of applications in the mobile devices segment with its greater functionality and mobility become a crucial factor for the enterprises today which forms an integral part of the enterprise growth strategy and globalization.

Enterprise mobile devices today have an excellent voice functionality that allows clear multi party conference calls; call management and interoperability between fixed phones and mobile phones, Internet calls ( VoIP over WLAN). Despite being largely voice driven a smart phone also enables reading Word, Excel, Powerpoint files and, to some extent, edit them and synchronize the changes with the PC. Good browsing capabilities, multiple email clients.

Adopting mobile devices in the enterprise is mainly driven by the need to increase productivity without incurring high costs. Moreover, companies which have standard open systems on which applications are built want to see how best people can leverage off open platforms when they are displaced from their work station.

For the enterprise user mobile devices also help in maintaining work-life balance especially for those organization aiming at the international market, mobile devices and applications provide them with an edge and advantage to be more competitive and help them work towards a 24x7 working scenario. Key challenges facing mobile workforce:

Mobility is not only a “matter of location in time and space”as the mobility can be spatial, temporal and contextual.

In the research conducted by the MOMENTO project published in HINDAWI Journals, they mentioned the following key challenges of mobile workforce:

•	Effectiveness- or the accuracy and completeness with which intended goals are achieved. •	Efficiency is a measure of the amount of human, economic, and temporal resources that are extended in attaining a required level of product effectiveness, such as time taken to complete tasks. •	Satisfaction refers to the comfort in using the system and its overall functionality. •	Learnability can be measured as the beginners time to attain the average skills with the system and efficiency by considering how fast and accurately a practiced user can work with the system. •	Ease of installation, ease of use, safety and support. •	Adoption of other security solutions and connectivity. •	Cost has been another limiting factor for the adoption of mobile devices. •	Interoperability is another issue which needs to be addresses by device agnostic solutions.

In summary, convenience, reach, increased productivity and efficiency are main factors that are driving companies to adopt wireless technologies as it`s generally accepted to be the right media to reach the largest target audience at the least cost. Productivity enhancement applications give enterprises a competitive edge to improve turnaround time and decision making thus improve profits.

The importance of mobility in an organization is growing day by day, and with better devices and innovative applications mobile workforce will be the lifeline of the enterprise. The driving factors in the next one to two years will be increase availability, easy to integrate applications and competitive advantage.

References 1.	D. Steinbock, The Mobile Revolution: The Making of Mobile Services Worldwide, Kogan Page, London, UK, 2005. 2.	M. Vartiainen, “Mobile virtual work-concepts, outcomes and challenges,” in Mobile Virtual Work: A New Paradigm?, J. H. E. Andrieseen and M. Vartiainen, Eds., pp. 13–44, Springer, New York, NY, USA, 2006. 3.	M. Wiberg, ““Anytime, anywhere” in the context of mobile work,” in Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology I-V, Idea Group, Hershey, Pa, USA, 2005. 4.	N. D. Evans, Business Agility—Strategies for Gaining Competitive Advantage through Mobile Business Solutions, Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, USA, 2002. 5.	I. Lee, J. Kim, and J. Kim, “Use contexts for the mobile internet: a longitudinal study monitoring actual use of mobile internet services,” International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 269–292, 2005. 6.	Sonia Sharma Mobile Enterprise on the Go! sonias@cybermedia.co.in