h t t p : / / w w w . i c o n v e r s e .

c o m

The Impact of
Mobile Application Technology
on Today's Workforce

Tim Rochford
Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder
iConverse Inc.
March 2001

888 Saratoga Avenue, Suite 203. San Jose, CA 95129

 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Overview

Mobile application technology enables deep structural change in how organizations

accomplish goals by cost-effectively moving existing automated business processes
beyond organizations’ premises to wherever and whenever those processes are engaged
most efficiently. Mobile technology allows organizations to gain greater reach and
leverage new kinds of service delivery and interaction, culminating in significant
productivity gains. Though the technology is new, the trend is old: enabling greater
coordination of organizations’ planning activities and how they are executed.

Consider Scottish economist Adam Smith’s story of the pin factory from “An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.” During the 18th century, Smith
observed that specialization of skill and organization of work have a remarkable impact
on productivity. He used a pin factory as an example. With 10 workers who lacked
specialized skills, working in parallel but separately (each performing every
manufacturing operation), the factory struggled to produce 200 pins a day. With the same
10 workers, each specializing in different pin manufacturing operations and working as a
coordinated team, the factory could produce 48,000 pins a day. In both instances the
materials and tools were the same  the essential differences were the specialized
knowledge of the workers and the coordination of their efforts, which yielded a
significant improvement in productivity.

Academics and practitioners have long studied the impact of organizational coordination
and specialized knowledge on productivity. More recently, they have focused on the role
information technology (IT) has played in improving coordination and knowledge
dissemination, resulting in a positive impact on productivity. There is now a substantial
body of research indicating that new information technologies increase organizational
coordination and a widely held opinion that a major underpinning of the United States’
current economic prosperity is the decrease in coordination costs. IT can be a catalyst in
reducing those costs. (See “Information Technology and Productivity: A Review of the
Literature,” Erik Brynjolfsson and Shinkyu Yang, MIT Sloan School of Management,
published in “Advances in Computers,” Academic Press, Vol. 43, pages 179-214, 1996;
“Productivity, Profit and Consumer Welfare: Three Different Measures of Information
Technology’s Value,” Lorin Hitt and Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Sloan School of
Management, published in “MIS Quarterly,” June 1996; “Time: It Really Is Money 
Companies Can Prosper by Helping Customers Save Time,” Paul Romer,
InformationWeek.com, Sept. 11, 2000.)

Mobile applications, including speech-enabled applications, are the next phase of this IT
evolution, enabling cost-effective organizational coordination. Modern-day examples of
coordination are found in daily business activities:
! Arranging meetings
! Making travel plans
! Using a help desk
! Requesting and approving expenses
! Updating the status of sales leads

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

! Maintaining project plans

! Submitting service requests
! Placing repair or parts orders

At Your Desk Vs. On the Road

We all know there is a significant difference between working “at your desk” and “on the
road.” Working at your desk, you are “plugged in” to the organizations’ resources. On the
road, making use of the same resources is time-consuming and difficult due to network
availability, compatibility as well as security issues. Numerous organizational
interactions we perform quickly and frequently at our desks we forgo entirely when away
from the desk (see Figure 1). As you move further from the organizations’ networks, you
feel more “out of sync” with activities in your organization.

Figure 1
Little Leverage or Control for Remote Workers

Employee’s
paperwork at
headquarters

Remote workers have difficulty:

• Updating sales leads
• Submitting expenses
• Rearranging meetings

When on the road we feel disconnected, coordinating indirectly through those who are
“jacked in.” Sometimes you can get the help you need, sometimes you can’t. If you could
only do that coordinating yourself, wherever, whenever  update an account status,
arrange a meeting, rearrange your travel plans, etc. (see Figure 2). This network
disconnect has a significant impact. By 2003-2004, more than 75 percent of knowledge
workers  sales, marketing, legal, R&D and IT  are expected to be mobile (on the
road, work at home, remote office, etc.) at least 25 percent of the time, states IT and
market researcher META Group.

For these widely dispersed audiences, mobile access is the only interaction mode that can
be reliably counted on wherever and whenever they need it. Thus, a wireless application
is needed for the mobile interactions. Wireless application technology has become a safe
technology investment. Forrester Research predicts the wireless tools, services and
application market is expected to reach $11 billion by 2003.

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Figure 2
Mobile Technology Leverages & Automates Remote Processes

Work

Mobile Technology

Long term, mobile devices, including any telephone using conversational speech (a
telephony method based on targeting more commonly used words so the human voice
system knows how to interpret what’s been spoken), will provide the broadest, most
reliable reach to any audience. Broadest reach because most people own a mobile device
because of its inexpensive price and most reliable because a mobile device is always with
us because of its compact size. According to the United States Telecom Association, in
1999, there were nearly 37 million wireless Internet devices deployed worldwide  and
that number is expected to increase to more than 190 million by 2003. Metcalfe’s Law
states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of people
connected. By this measure, mobile networks will be immensely valuable. An
astronomical 75 percent of all Web access is expected to be wireless by 2003, asserts
Jupiter Research.

Ultimately, the measure of mobile technology for organizations is the extent to which it
increases coordination between the organization and its stakeholders: e.g., employees,
customers and partners. Key factors of coordination are reach and power, and mobile
technology affects both. Broad and timely reach can be achieved with greater economy
and reliability of interaction. Greater power of interaction can be achieved through
increased leverage of more tightly synchronized organization activity. Mobile technology
will follow historical technology trends, eventually affecting the very structure of
organizations.

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Who Benefits?

Both the organization and the individual will benefit from the opportunities provided by
mobile application technology. The organization will be able to extend the power of IT-
based organization coordination beyond the tether of wired networks. The individual will
be able to streamline personal processes that require coordination with other individuals
and organizations.

Some real-life examples of increased employee productivity because of mobile

technology:

! Iowa farmers can use wireless Internet while in the field, enabling them to change
spraying and planting plans based on changing weather conditions, watch
commodity prices and communicate through email.
RESULT: Better use of precious time and the ability to adapt to changing
conditions.

! A retail pharmaceutical chain wants to allow customers to renew prescriptions via

wireless devices. Alerts will notify customers when their prescriptions are filled.
RESULT: More convenience for customers and less labor requirements
for the enterprise.

! A real estate company would like to provide access to listing information, assess
creditworthiness, understand what homes a client can afford, narrow down the
choices and map out a plan to visit the potential purchases, while receiving up-to-
the-minute alerts about new listings coming on the market.
RESULT: Better customer service, more efficient use of employees’ time,
financial savings and greater productivity.

What Are the Challenges?

The distributed nature of Internet has been a boon in delivering enterprise information
and services, such as help-desk support or IS requests, to audiences at work or their
home, but it’s of limited help when they are outside their “home base.” Also, there is a
cost to configuring a remote connection to the Internet. This cost acts as a deterrent to
remote use of organization services. The connection setup price tag and perceived
security risk of attempting remote access to “home base” are often considered higher than
the benefit warrants. It is common to see members of a project team at clients’ and
prospects’ sites using Microsoft Hotmail through other organizations’ computers to learn
what’s happening back at their own companies.

This reluctance to interact with organizational services remotely introduces a significant

latency in the organizations’ processes. Remote individuals typically wait until they are
back on premises before accessing their organizations’ services. In a remote situation

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

where the service would be of highest value, individuals are forced to record the
information when they return to the office. Employees will need to pull out a notebook
back at the office, remember the context of the information and then enter it in the
company’s systems to complete the process. Obviously, this is a labor-intensive and
error-prone process. It would be much faster to perform these tasks immediately at the
time of the situation.

If employees had been able to perform those tasks regardless of location, processes would
have been kick-started at that moment. Key members of the organization as well as the
customer being served would have known an activity was started, so there would be no
synchronization blind spot. Perhaps the following comments could be avoided:
“Have they submitted the order?”
“I don’t know, they took the information when they were here though.”

It is clear people would like to access organizations’ services from wherever, and relying
on the facilities at remote locations doesn’t work. (Not all hotels have cable, T1 or T3
lines!) With wireless mobile capabilities, you can eliminate your dependency on remote
environments and streamline processes to reliably perform tasks where activities
originate.

Also, there are varying degrees of costs when restricted to landline technology, with the
company location being most expensive (see Figure 3). Organizations can predict and
control costs better with wireless technology’s consistent prices.

Figure 3
Current Organizational Investment in Landline Process Automation
High
Degree of Support (Cost $)

Company
Workplace

Home

Customer Sites and

Other Remote Locations

Low

Location of Support

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Because mobile application support is an exploding market, the technology is now

available at reasonable prices and accessible to wider audiences. Because of the usage
and buying patterns of the new devices, these handhelds really are a personal technology
with some devices quickly gaining popularity. Forrester Research estimates that smart
phones (having wireless Web access) will outnumber PDAs by 60:1 by the year 2005.

What issues arise when designing mobile applications to leverage the pervasive wireless
technology?

• Many different kinds of device technologies

o Internet-enabled desktops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), WAP
phones, pagers
o Different devices support multiple kinds of browsers, each behaving
differently
o Conversational speech accessed through any telephone
• Many network protocols with different characteristics
o Voice, data, messaging supporting traffic from real-time conversations to
one-way messaging
o WAP, GSM, CDMA, TDMA, CDPD, AMPS, SMS, TCP/IP, Mobitex,
ReFlex
• Many different kinds of enterprise information services to be delivered
o Sales, services, support, marketing, distribution
• Many different delivery situations
o In the office, at a customer site, in the airport, on a plane, on the road, at
home

Each of these issues has specific characteristics that need to be factored into the design of
a mobile application, and the characteristics can vary widely:

Factors due to devices

! Presentation – What form factor does the device provide? What browser
capabilities does it have? What markup language? How much text can it hold?
Does it support graphics and color? Is the presentation pushed to the device or
pulled to it? Can two forms of presentation be used in concert, e.g., spoken
requests for data?
! Persistence – What information is the device designed to hold? Can new kinds of
information be added? What form does that information take? How does the
information get entered? Synchronized? Backed up? Secured?
! Computational – Can the device perform calculations and logic? What language is
used? How does the new functionality get added to the device? How much
functionality can the device hold?

Factors due to channel (networks)

! Coverage – Where does the network coverage end? Can I roam outside that area?
How much will it cost? Is the coverage uniform or spotty?

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

! Performance – How fast is information transmitted? How long does it take for a
request to be serviced? How much information transmitted is mine and how much
is the networks?
! Security – How do I know no one can read my transmissions? Modify them? How
do I know no one can pretend to be me?

Factors due to services

! Transactions – How do I know the service won’t lose my request? Or respond to
my request twice?
! Concurrent access – How does the application respond when many people are
using it? How much slower does it get? Does it stop altogether?
! Information dependencies – What information do I need to have in order to use
the service? What steps in the service have to be done first? What information do
I have to remember between steps?

Factors due to interaction

! Directed – How goal oriented is the interaction? How quickly does the user want
the task completed? Is there goal at all? Is the user passive during the interaction
or leading the interaction?
! Interruptible – What else is happening around the user during this interaction?
Will the user need to stop the interaction to deal with something else? Will the
user want to resume the interaction later?
! Duration – How long does the interaction take overall? How much time does the
user expect to expend? Are there short cuts the user can take?
! Familiarity – How comfortable, pleasant and familiar is the interaction? How
much does the interaction on a mobile device resemble more familiar paper- or
desktop-based interactions? What communication norms have been violated or
reinforced?

Who Struggles With the Challenges?

IT departments, software developers and managers who implement business processes

struggle with these challenges as well as individuals who use them. Individuals can try to
compensate for awkward processes, but to be effective the design of the processes must
benefit both the organization and the individual. The processes must be compatible with
the activities and situations in which the individual engages them.

Though there is a lot of functionality on the desktop PC, but coordinating your tasks and
coordinating with others is still cumbersome. Incorporating new devices into your life
extends access but does not necessarily increase coordination. To gain increased
coordination and effectiveness, the applications and services available through the new
devices must be delivered through situation-appropriate interactions. This means the
experience should take an appropriate amount of time and effort, and the interaction
should not be stressful. This requires striking a balance between organizational efficiency

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

on the one hand and ease of learning, use and situational fit on the other. To strike this
balance, the designer  the software developer  of the interaction needs an efficient
design process with awareness of and full control over the resulting experience.

How Tough Are the Challenges?

The challenge of designing mobile applications to be delivered to any device across any
network in many different usage situations is much larger than is encountered in desktop
“user interface” design. Even a cursory consideration shows this.

Let’s say there are five different networks and five different devices per network.
(There’s more of each!) Delivering an application to all those devices requires dealing
with 25 permutations. Current “user interface” design assumes one network (TCP/IP over
10-100MB Ethernet) and one or two devices (a desktop or laptop running Internet
Explorer or Netscape). The current application design process addresses just two
permutations of devices and networks.

Even with this very conservative, over-simplified example, there is at least an order of
magnitude greater difficulty introduced by the emerging diversity of devices and
networks over the current user interface design. Hundreds of characteristics from
different screen sizes and pixels to protocols and connection speeds must be considered
In addition, mobile application usage occurs in situations much more varied than
stationary usage in a fixed environment.

Will the Challenges Become Easier or Harder?

Today’s problems are device and network diversity. Aren’t they going away with faster
networks and consolidation of devices? Networks will get faster, but the diversity of
network capability will likely remain due to both technology and economic factors.
Network speeds are increasing both at the low and high end so the spread in speed will
not disappear. Since wireless network bandwidth is a shared resource and demand is
increasing, actual gains will be in practice dependent on the adoption rate as the General
Packet Radio Services (GPRS) and third-generation wireless (3G) become available. It is
also likely that bandwidth consumption will be differentiated based on willingness and
ability to pay.

Mobile devices will likely consolidate within consumer categories, but there will be an
increasing number of consumer categories typical of other maturing markets. Consider
cars or wristwatches.

The sleeping giant of challenges will be the diversity in usage situations that introduce
greater variation in “appropriate interactions.” As devices become richer in capability, the

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

range of mobile situations that can benefit from mobile coordination increases. However,
not all the situational constraints are technological, so interactions will still need to take
into account contextual factors such as attention, privacy, social interactions, etc.

What Are the Alternative Operational Approaches to the Challenges?

There are several alternative approaches to addressing the challenges outlined above.
• Let third parties deliver the service through any delivery channel regardless of
interaction quality
o Con: Limited inclination to use or utility, i.e., limited leverage
• Write applications through one or two delivery channels providing high-level
interaction quality
o Con: Limit reach: network coverage, not all personally owned devices
• Write multiple separate applications, each targeting a different delivery channel
o Con: Expensive and redundant
• Factor out the part of the application that handles delivery channel and use
technology that supports different interactions across the different delivery
channels

What Are the Technology Approaches to Mobile Connectivity?

The technology approaches have come in several generations.

Generation I: Transcoding
This method automatically converts one form of presentation (HTML for desktop
browsers) into other forms of presentation markup: Wireless Markup Language (WML),
HTML for mobile devices. This approach has limitations due to a) the frequent revision
of the original presentation markup that causes the conversion to break, b) the new
application can only be a subset of the original application, and the target usage situations
for the new application often demands otherwise.

Generation II: Proprietary Markup

Similar to the transcoding, one markup is converted to another. But this approach has a
specific set of rules encoded in a markup language that specifies how to perform the
markup transformation. This technology requires building special skill sets in the
conversion markup language.

Generation III: Parallel Publishing

This technology uses simulated device models to experiment with the look and operation
of the application on different devices simultaneously during design. The application can
be experienced while the layout is being created for each device or device class. Since the
conversion is computed from the graphically specified layout, no specialized language
skills are required.

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Evolving Application Architectures

Application architecture has transitions through several

Figure 4
well-known phases typically classified by the number of
logical tiers. Centralized Mainframe Computing

1. Centralized “mainframe” computing  all

devices in the system were controlled centrally
(see Figure 4). Persistence, transaction,
validation, computation, navigation and
presentation logic were all executed on the
mainframe. Presentation logic was minimal.

Figure 5
2. Client/server computing  the database tier was Client/Server Computing
separate from client (see Figure 5). The logic
was split across both tiers. Persistence and some
transaction, validation and computation logic
were executed on the database tier. The client
executed transaction, validation, computation,
navigation and presentation logic. Logic
supporting the user became much richer,
providing much more interactivity and
personalizing the application is introduced.

Figure 6
3. Web-based computing  a midtier was
Web-Based Computing
introduced between the database and the
client (see Figure 6). The client is Web App Server
typically hosted in one of two rich
desktop browsers executing some
validation and computation, as well as
navigation and presentation logic. The
midtier contains transaction, validation,
computation and navigation logic. The
user experience is now part of a larger
Internet
ecosystem and has multiple purposes,
serving as an advertising venue, news
delivery vehicle as well as an application interface. On the midtier, portions of the
presentation and navigation are generated dynamically and aggregated into a
single, sometimes personalized, user experience. The database tier contains
persistence and minimal transaction and validation.

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

A new phase is currently unfolding, but continuing the trend:

Figure 7
4. XML-based computing  XML-Based Computing
the midtier is split into an
XML-service tier and user- Interaction Transaction
experience tier (see Figure Server Server
7). The XML-service tier is
part of a large ecosystem
serving multiple purposes, <XML>
exposing “content” and
“services” for B2B
automation, affiliate <XML>
programs and the user
experience. This tier B2B
executes transaction,
validation and computation
and personalization logic. The user-experience tier executes navigation,
aggregation and personalization and generates validation, computation, navigation
and presentation logic for the client. The number of client hosts is exploding with
capabilities ranging from the familiar rich desktop browser to mobile devices to
spoken interfaces. The next generation of mobile devices will become
substantially more capable with respect to both presentation and computation.
Other delivery vehicles, including Internet appliances, telematics (automobile
systems that combine global positioning satellite (GPS) tracking and other
wireless communications) and interactive TV, will be emerging as cost-effective
alternatives as well. The different client devices and usage situations require the
client to adapt with different styles of interaction underpinning the user
experience. The adapted client behavior ranges from presentation only to
persistence, computation, validation, navigation and presentation logic. The
database tier contains persistence and minimal transaction and validation.

The interactivity problem is rapidly growing more complex from the new technical
capabilities, but also from new possibilities in using the different devices in various
combinations. The first problem to address in dealing with this new interactive world
is to provide a timely and cost-effective yet compelling way of delivering services
through a much larger number of delivery channels (networks and devices). The
solution here focuses on just getting an appropriate interaction out to the different
devices through the different networks (see Figure 8).

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Figure 8
Interactive App Platform Must Handle
Varied Requests From Multiple Devices

Interactive
Application
Platform

Service
Platform

The low-cost and differing purposes of alternative devices encourage large numbers of
individuals to incorporate the use of multiple devices into their lives. The ability to
coordinate use of multiple devices becomes a key productivity factor. Based on lifestyle,
different people will establish different usage patterns or “personal processes” across
their devices to streamline and schedule activities, consolidate personal information and
to choose the best interaction style for a given task (see Figure 9). These personal
processes are in contrast to organizational processes in that they streamline the
individuals’ activities whereas organizational processes focus on streamlining the
organization.

Figure 9
Employees Develop Usage Patterns or
Personal Processes With Different Devices

Personal
Processes

Interactive
Application
Platform

Service
Platform

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 The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce

Of course taking an organizational perspective, individuals actually coordinate activities

both through formal organizational processes and interpersonally. Interpersonal processes
allow you to informally and quickly specify how you interact with other people, e.g., who
can reach you, when and how. More important, the interactive application platform must
be able to coordinate cross-device communications to streamline business processes and
achieve better collaboration (see Figure 10).

Figure 10
Interactive App Platform Must Enable Cross-Device
Communications to Streamline Processes

Interpersonal
Processes

Interactive
Application
Platform

Service
Platform

On the service platform side, the interface to the service tier is quickly becoming data-
driven, richer and more standardized. Internet standards for service discover, description,
interoperation and integration are rapidly becoming the foundation for making
interoperating with application services a much more cost-effective and timely process.

XML-based standards and specifications such as Universal Discovery, Description and

Integration (UDDI), Web Service Description Language (WSDL), ebXML and eSpeak as
well as the broad set of schema definitions available through OASIS make interoperation
information universally accessible in both human and machine readable form.

The service platforms implementing these standards are based on transaction

technologies and provide the process support necessary to reliably streamline the
organization. In contrast, the interactive application platform exploiting service
interoperation standards is based on interaction technology and provides the necessary
support to streamline individuals’ activities delivering device, channel and situation-
appropriate experiences regardless of location.

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