Talking with…

Charmaine Eggberry, vice president, of enterprise business unit, Europe,Middle East and Africa, Research in Motion (RIM), discusses how enterprises can adapt to an increasingly mobile workforce and the change in working practices.

Facing the mobility challenge
Over the last fifteen years, mobility solutions have evolved from mobile phones and pagers to wireless email and mobile business applications. Technology had to adapt to a rapidly increasing mobile workforce so that organisations could maintain communication with travelling executive. Today, changes in working practices continue to have a profound impact on organisations’ technology needs.

Futurologists predict that the boundaries between work and personal time will become increasingly blurred as people start to work the pattern that suits the job as well as the other demands in their lives, outside of work. Managers and their teams have to recognise a new definition of success, where employees are no longer measured by the hours they put in, but by the results they achieve. Organisations therefore need to re-evaluate the way they do business to ensure that communication and collaboration are not compromised.

Many organisations recognise that they can achieve considerable business value with applications that go significantly beyond wireless email and implement solutions that can extend traditional applications to the wireless realm. The mobile handhelds that help executives stay in touch can also be used to schedule and support field service personnel, empower the mobile sales force and help employees become more productive through wireless access to relevant information and back-end data stores.

Factors for success
Accessing corporate data, whenever and wherever employees need to, is a key factor for success because it enables employees to make informed business decisions faster. Indeed, in order to meet the demand for increased business speed and agility as well as to accommodate the social shift in working life, where people will not be measured simply on ‘presence’ but on ‘achievements’, organisations need a solution that extends and enhances the use of wireless communication in the enterprise. At RIM, we call this ‘beyond email’.

We’ve seen the needs of organisations and professional users go far beyond email: for enterprises, their needs range from mobile business solutions like CRM to salesforce support; for individuals, from navigation to time management.

Beyond email
Already more than 60% of our enterprise customer base deploys BlackBerry beyond email. Our first customers identified the need for beyond email six years ago – and since then RIM has worked on a platform to fulfil these needs. Key features include security, management, and administration, push access to data and ease of application development and deployment.

The BlackBerry Independent Software Vendor (ISV) alliance programme brings together leading international software providers and niche developers offering third party applications and services to help users benefit from beyond email. In 2006, BlackBerry will continue to work closely with its ISV partners to develop tailor-made solutions that range from satisfying specific needs to addressing diverse business areas including the legal, financial and entertainment industries. In January 2006, BlackBerry signed a partnership with Google that enables the BlackBerry wireless platform to support Google Talk instant messaging and Google local for mobile. Similar agreements with companies including Yahoo enhance BlackBerry’s service offering to global users.

In addition to accessing standard applications, enterprises will require the flexibility to make customised solutions wireless. The vision of beyond email is the vision of an open platform which will easily enable the integration of company solutions. As the BlackBerry platform is Java-based, the development of bespoke applications is easy. The IT department at West Yorkshire police developed a customised version of a desktop application used in the police station and deployed it to BlackBerry devices in less than two weeks.

Police in West Yorkshire now use BlackBerry devices to run real-time checks on suspects they stop on the street or in vehicles. BlackBerry devices provide operational officers with access to data held on the national crime database, the Police National Computer (PNC) and enable crime reporting and work on prosecution files to take place out of the station. BlackBerry has helped the West Yorkshire Police force improve police presence on the streets and increase officer productivity.

With BlackBerry, it is evident that organisations re-invent how critical business processes are performed; they use mobile solutions to improve efficiency, boost productivity, generate additional revenues and gain competitive advantages in the market.

Enabling change and success
There is no doubt that mobile technology has changed our lives, both personally and professionally. Being accessible on the go makes us more efficient and gives us peace of mind. While mobile phones have kept us in touch, the next generation of mobile devices is helping us achieve a better work-life balance and the vision of “beyond email”.

Beyond email will change enterprises and society even more than mobile email. Fast, informed and effective decisions require speedy access to data wherever the user may be, and this is imperative for business success.

The workforce will not be measured if they do ‘9 to 5’ hours but on having achieved agreed results. As such, there will be much more flexibility about where and when people work. We see BlackBerry as a tool that helps people to work where they want, when they want. A recent Ipsos-Reid study shows that BlackBerry can increase the efficiency of an entire team by nearly 30%, simply by allowing mobile professionals to keep work moving forward while they are away from the office. Besides increased productivity, organisations that use BlackBerry also benefit from compelling ROI, improved decision making and improved customer satisfaction.

Wireless solutions, notably BlackBerry, have become more than a critical communications tool for the executive, they have become the enablers of change and success across the entire workforce.