BIOS: Technology Means Business

Remember when business communication lived or died by the fax machine? Remember when it was about snail mail, and copies in triplicate? When waiting for a call meant just that - sitting at your desk, staring at the phone, desperate for it to ring?

It’s come a long way since then. Once the but of endless jokes about yuppies and house-bricks - and with a number of reliability issues to be overcome - mobile phones are now almost part of the furniture.

Even more significant for business users, mobile e-mail has become so prevalent that its addictive properties are likened to those of Class A narcotics. The truth is that providers of mobile e-mail services have helped create a remote workforce whose ranks have been swelled by traditional office-based workers, liberated by increasingly sophisticated technology.

Time spent in transit, whether it’s to the occasional international conference or the daily circuit of back-to-back sales meetings, is no longer a productivity killer. Mobile e-mail is so much more than simply replacing a case-full of paper files: it’s truly interactive. Documents can be worked on, amended, checked and dispatched; decisions made and communicated; updates received and acted on. Journalists can file stories, lawyers attend court and health care workers visit patients without constantly returning to the office to pick up the next set of documents.

If the mobile e-mail system also offers access to contacts and calendars on the move, then so much the better. Workers can respond immediately to any given event: contacting key colleagues and partners directly, arranging meetings, and re-scheduling their days to maximise productivity. There’s no more time spent hanging around in uncommunicative limbo. Since there is no need constantly to refer back to the office, the whole organisation is moving closer to that elusive goal: the real-time operation.

But like all technologies, mobile communication is far from stagnant. The devices and gadgets are getting more sophisticated, and more stylish - and certainly more functional. But the technology behind the surface is also changing rapidly too. In fact mobile e-mail is just the start of a whole new range of mobile services for business. The rise of mobile e-mail has coincided rather neatly with another technological phenomenon, known as thin client computing. In a standard office environment, the thin client model would mean that all the applications - your Microsoft Office, your inventory database, your CRM system - would all be stored on the corporate servers. Instead of having individual versions on each PC, desktop computers are simply the channels to access the software and the documents you need.

This idea is now going mobile. So instead of just having access to your e-mail from your PDA, you can access all sorts of corporate information through the device. You no longer need to get to a Wi-Fi hotspot to access the entire system, or hole yourself up in your hotel room. Nor do you need to carry a laptop - if you want, your phone can do it all for you. And the company’s administrator can set who has access to what. Unlike the standard VPN connections that currently provide remote access to the business network and enable users to go digging around the darkest recesses of the system if they wish, a thin client mobile system lets you define what you need and stick to it. It’s not about browsing the system, it’s about time-saving direct access.

The thin client is also a much more secure way to go about mobile computing. How many mobile devices are lost every year? Thousands. And if members of MI6 can do it, then so can you. The point is that with thin client models, if you lose your phone - that’s all you lose. There’s no valuable data stored on it to go missing too. The good news is that the costs are going down - which will dramatically increase the amount of mobile data transfers we can conduct in the future. O2 has already announced that its international roaming charges are being cut, and other operators are bound to follow. It can only be a matter of time before data charges fall in a similar way. In the meantime, ever more sophisticated data compression techniques will keep call costs as low as possible.

And once new communications technologies become fixtures on land lines, they swiftly move over to the mobile space. Expect mobile VoIP - a converged voice and data service - to be coming to a phone near you soon. If you can’t wait, then instant messaging is already here, so you can carry on that business-critical conversation as you leave the office. The bottom line is that mobile or remote working has evolved from being a specialist activity or lifestyle issue for certain types of workers into one that affects all companies and all employees. And the technology behind it is continuing to develop. There are great opportunities for improved productivity, lower costs, more flexibility and a better, less frustrating working life for millions of us. Go on, see what happens next.