The benefits of mobile information systems are well understood by most large service and utility businesses. The tangible and intangible benefits are strong, and have evolved to a position where such systems are simply an essential business tool. The economy of scale allows these businesses to fund both design and development also to tailor applications and back-office interfaces to meet business need, fine tuning the business process model. Smaller service sector businesses represent over 50% of the national effort, but, until recently, have been largely untouched by the mobile data benefits enjoyed by the big boys. A visit to a small field service business will usually reveal mobile phones, a few PDAs purchased ad-hoc from Dixons, with locally synchronised Outlook diaries, and perhaps a shared PIM available over the Internet. Not a great advance on the Filofax, and certainly not grounds to re-define the business processes for efficiency.

A few years ago some of the larger software houses promoted the notion of the application service provider, the ASP. With this model we would all have word processors and office suites as pay-for service, and presumably, have been charged by the memo, the minute, or the keystroke. This offered few user benefits, and the idea, quite rightly, died. At the time a lack of available broadband, and of always-on digital wireless services such as GPRS put the lid on the ASP coffin. However, ideas have a habit of coming back in different forms, and the ASP model is now beginning to serve under rental or lease,  proper mobile work applications, where business users can see and measure a benefit. In the last year I have seen an increasing number of examples of pay-as-you-go mobile services. These include e-mail, location, work management, and document delivery. Not all these things are joined up, so there still remains space for more specialist applications, and for those who can link them together without a big development bill. For the SME sector the hardest problem in using a service still remains connectivity to old pre-existing back-office systems and legacy data, never easy to solve cheaply, especially where the real-time issues of work management emerge. Perhaps it would be easier to lease the whole system?

Even in the MCUG secretariat office we have moved to an ASP model for server/vpn/anti virus/firewall/mail server/diary – the updates and security patches are thankfully now the problem of the application provider who leases a server package that he updates 24/7. For the smaller business this can make perfect sense, trading a monthly revenue for the provision of service and removal of headaches.

GPRS and data rates.
I have recently been using GPRS to facilitate mobile working, and I felt it time to share a few of the experiences. A bandwidth hungry, but very easy, way to set up a mobile service is to use a VPN and Windows Terminal Server to deliver the office desktop straight to the field. This is not such a good idea if you want to use a PDA, but is fine on a laptop. The interesting issues for the small user come in setting up, in performance, and in bill paying.

The experiment covered two wireless options, the first, using a PCMCIA data card in the laptop slot, and the second using a recent GPRS-ready mobile phone as the modem. Of the two, the data card was by far the simplest option. The GPRS/3g card supplier had clearly thought about the user, and provided software to handle the connection, also providing a SIM and network account where data was fully enabled. Installation and log-on were nearly automatic, and provided you  are patient and can cope with Terminal Services sessions over a service that sometimes drops to a data rate of 9 k bits per second, then the office 'Windows' desktop is yours. Once connected, disconnects were rare given a good signal.

The phone was a bit more of a challenge. Firstly we started with attempting a blue tooth connection, laptop to phone. The bundle of fragmented, and confusingly named, driver/applications that came with the phone allowed synchronisation of various phone functions, but defied establishment of a modem data link over Bluetooth – never mind – we added a USB cable. The USB cable was an improvement. It charged the phone, which, in any case,  is necessary in a long data session, and installed easily, the only unfortunate feature was that it created a virtual serial COM port which one needed to guess the number of, and then nominate, as the connection. The next pitfall was that some networks seem to assume that all you need is service using the data ports associated with WAP browsing. This leaves you with a connection to the Internet, but, mysteriously, no service for VPN or for conventional http browsers. Having the services enabled required several calls to the network before things were switched on. Once finally working, the service worked well, and worked abroad with foreign partner networks accepting the same login as at home. All very impressive. Also impressive can be the bills. GPRS data is charged by adding the volumes of up and of down traffic together. Graphical interfaces such as terminal services generate a reasonable amount of traffic,  and at £5 per megabyte abroad, the costs of browsing even for web-mail become quite significant. Using a mail client to collect data, and then only from your IMAP or POP mail server is potentially much more efficient provided you are not inundated with spam with attachments. The emerging 3g services periodically caused the little blue 3g light to come on, and the data rate would speed up dramatically, but only when in my office which is near the city centre, and not out in the wilds. The maintenance of a session as the network switched services was also impressive considering the protocol complexities involved. I guess things will continue to improve, but I could not help thinking of the small business user, and how much effort they are, or are not, prepared to put in to setting up systems themselves when confronted with technical issues.

User Group News
We are now planning the 2005 annual forum for the 19th and 20th April, and a small forum for users of Mobile IT in Local Government. We need to hear from users who can present their own case studies in mobile data, and especially from those early adopters of applications that are leased, and served remotely. With the current forum, with first inspection, Local Government IT managers developing a mobile data strategy face similar issues to the Utilities, where expertise and business needs are compartmentalised, and a myriad of back-office systems present interface challenges of both a technical and political nature. The collection of data gathered real-time in the field now needs to be translated in to work schedules and action in real time. In most cases this is where the difficult challenge will lie. The gulf between discovery and action is wide. It needs to be bridged to bring the step change in service-response that central government now expects.