Technologists and marketing gurus addressing utility information technology chiefs often play on the industry’s poor customer trust levels to inspire the uptake of products that will enable them to communicate more effectively with mobile, “always-on” consumers.
In last week’s issue of Utility Week, Customer Whisperers’ Nicola Eaton Sawford urged distribution network operators to overhaul their communications strategies when dealing with outages, based in part on the fact that 4.2 million people in the UK work from home.
However, the issue of changing working habits should be of interest not only in terms of external communications and customer satisfaction strategies. Leaps forward in mobile communications technologies have also transformed working practices within utilities and, if discussion at a recent Microsoft summit on workforce mobility is anything to go by, they will continue to do so.
Workforce mobility solutions are tied to customer satisfaction targets. They enable quicker response times from field workers, for instance, and, if connected intelligently to customer relationship management data, can empower them to deliver a better service.
But that is not the end of the business case for a mobile workforce, according to speakers at the event – many of whom came from within industry. Key participants included British Gas, Severn Trent Services and United Utilities.
As a group, the presentations recorded efficiencies in fuel consumption, gains in field worker productivity and more effective asset management and maintenance as a few areas where investments in workforce mobility have made returns to the business.
To gain these returns, and to continue deriving benefits, workforce mobility cannot be treated as a standalone technology strategy – that was a clear message from many speakers.
Severn Trent’s story of moving from being a 97 per cent on-premises organisation with around 19 domains to a cloud first, single domain enterprise, illustrated neatly how mobility needs to dovetail with broader enterprise technology aims. Meanwhile, Baljit Dhillon, business change manager at British Gas, spoke about his organisation’s drive to understand the broader impact of mobility on working practices and processes across the business.
Dhillon is leading an initiative to create a better value proposition from a “package” of technologies supporting field workers, office-based employees and customers.
British Gas has invested a great deal in empowering field workers to make better decisions and work more effectively while on the move. Some 8,300 of its field workers now possess iPhones to support their roles.
The investment, combined with GPS vehicle tracking, job allocation systems, route planning and more has already brought significant improvement in the efficient and effective use of human resource in the field. Dhillon is convinced that further integration of business and technology strategy will bring additional gains – not only in terms of firm financial or operational benefits, but also in “softer” ways.
Several speakers at the event referred to the empowering impact of mobility technologies and their ability to raise field worker morale and engagement – not to mention safety.
Taking responsibility for lone workers out in the field was a recurring topic and the idea of incorporating panic buttons on handheld or wearable mobile devices caused ears to prick up. Some participants said they were already actively investigating this step.
It wasn’t all technology evangelism among this group of enthusiasts however. There was scepticism too.
For instance, excitement about the potential of a “bring your own device” (BYOD) trend to revolutionise workforce mobility and cut corporate technology procurement bills was seen, unequivocally, to have been a passing fad. Recent Gartner research has suggested that 20 per cent of BYOD projects fail, but Microsoft’s UK managing director Michel Van der Bel said he thought it was more in the region of 80 per cent.
The question of security was a concern, though not in relation to cloud resilience, as is often the case. A panel debate between three senior technologists revealed mixed experiences and opinion about the threat of data harvesting from downloaded apps on mobile devices. One company said they had developed a selection of in-house apps to mimic those popularly used on private devices in order to illuminate the problem.
When asked why non-work apps were permitted at all, the representative said banning them raised the potential of double standards for office management
and field workers during breaks.
Finally, the problem of limited connectivity for the remote locations, in which utilities field workers often find themselves, was mentioned repeatedly – but more as an accepted bug bear which made offline working capability a must, than as something which users expected to be resolved.
The wide-ranging discussion at this event shed light on the scope of business benefits to be gained from enabling workforce mobility, but it also highlighted how this ambition is connected with manifold other business and technology strategies – including, but not confined to, customer satisfaction improvement.
This complexity poses a challenge to utility IT professionals – especially in a world where departmental leaders are prone to make snap technology decisions to meet the immediate needs of their business silos.