Productivity in the Mobile Workforce

Authored by Dayle Wilson, Principal Technical Consultant 

Dayle Wilson, Principal Technical Consultant – Macquarie Telecom

There is a large trend in organisations to make their sales force (and sometimes back office) more productive. Many employees are now doing business out of the office as a result. At one point in time, the only people that had remote access to corporate network resources was the IT department. Now, this has changed in order to improve productivity and turnaround time for the sales force when producing quotes and contracts for their potential customers.

Whereas previously employees on the road were only able to fill out their paperwork and bring it back to the office, now there are usually many more options available. Quotes can now often be made on the road by accessing CRM software with mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Employees no longer need to be physically located in a call centre to take calls either—instead, they can leverage VOIP (Voice Over IP) to take service calls, support calls, or new business calls directly from home. In addition, intellectual property is completely protected on mobile devices in case they are ever lost or stolen.

While there will probably always be centralised office headquarters, there is definitely a trend towards shifting resources so they are made available from home or on the road. This is why security and performance are increasingly large concerns form an IT perspective. Thanks to high speed internet and encryption through secure tunnels, corporate resources are available anywhere in a secure manner. Workers are fully self-sufficient and able to do their jobs without having to step foot in the office.

One area, however, that still has room for improvement is VOIP, because consumer-grade internet connections may not be as robust as corporate infrastructure. If consumer internet connections improve in regard to reliability and congestion issues in the future, then VOIP glitches and poor performance will become a thing of the past.

Applications are also now being written in languages that facilitate lightweight clients over the internet. HTML 5, SSL, and web front ends have made thick clients a thing of the past in many cases. Thanks to new optimisations, productivity will be maximised, since connectivity between corporate resources and the end user are being constantly improved.

If you want to find out more about worker productivity in the mobile workforce, contact Macquarie Telecom on +61 2 8221 7777 (or freecall 1800 004 943) and ask to get transferred to me. You can also email me directly or submit and online enquiry.