Are New Mobile Solutions Right for You?

With advances in technology, there are mobile solutions in the market to help you work better when mobile. Listening to vendors, you could use your handhelds when mobile just like you could with your PC and phone in the office- and you don’t even need an office! But the reality is that it’s not just technology that will help you. There are actually 3 things you should look at when building a solution for working mobile. The first is- when working mobile, are you as close to your customer as you need to be and if not, what’s missing? Then you should be looking at technology and deciding what tools are available to be more productive and effective. And the third area is financial and very important- are you saving money by implementing these changes? If you can answer all three questions in the affirmative, you’ve got a plan for success. Employees typically have a desk phone, a desktop and/or laptop computer and a cell phone, mostly smartphones. This means an office number running on one network, a different mobile number and cellular network, two voicemail boxes and a data network for email and various applications. Voice conferencing is distinct from video conferencing and when you’re mobile it can be complicated for the normal worker. Teleworking is fairly primitive with existing remote access. Ideally you’d like to offer the same application set wherever your employees are with a unified service for voice and data and have one directory and one number reach. It would be great to have speech/voice recognition for converting email and text to voice and vice versa- and presence information for callers to know where you are. It’d be nice to have your mobile as an extension of your enterprise and have call hand-off with desk/ mobile phones and the same feature access in the enterprise when you’re mobile (including voice/ video conferencing and dialling). But for each of these capabilities, how does this relate to your customer, does the technology actually make it easier and more productive for you to do business and is the ROI financially attractive? Even though vendors market a single network to handle everything wherever you are, the wireline, wi-fi, cellular and IP networks described above will all co-exist in some way to communicate. And chances are slim that you’ll do a complete technology forklift of old for new as there are contracts in place, systems that aren’t paid off and financially, you need to justify each category of change. But with proper planning, it’s doable. Don’t be fooled by the ‘high tech’ marketing of vendors who will try to sell the newest bells and whistles. Frankly, you’re not buying whistles. What you’re trying to do is have a proper mobile strategy to help you do business better when mobile.