Budget Caps vs. Mobile and Flexible Working Savings

How you could navigate budget constraints and still achieve efficiencies

The UK government is looking to save up to £3.2bn on ICT spending over the next five years according to the results of a long term Treasury review of public spending.  As we await the full impact of budget announcements later this month, ICT budgets are clearly not immune as spending reduction reviews continue in the public sector.

The challenge for ICT and business operations leaders is acute - how to reduce spending without cutting back on the quality of ICT service delivery.

No more big projects?

It looks likely that the era of massive multi-billion pound ICT projects is well and truly over.

As a consequence, public sector leadership, and their suppliers, have to work hard to avoid slumping into underinvestment in ICT at the very time that a serious impact on effectiveness would undermine the very cost savings that are so desperately needed from transformation of front-line services coupled with savings in back-end facilities.

Analysts at research house Ovum have been considering the likely outcomes. Ovum's latest Technology Trends survey shows that end-to-end business transformation projects (including core systems replacement) and systems simplification (improving existing systems) are two of the top priorities of the UK public sector.

ICT budgets typically reflect between a 2:1 and 3:1 ratio of ongoing operational costs of maintaining existing systems and processes, against new investment.

It is clear that major cost benefits can be gain by maximising the effectiveness of ongoing operational spend, offering significant rewards. Each £ saved could be made available for new investment and help organisations avoid underinvestment in IT.

The reality is, demand for public services will not diminish. An imperative for the sector is exploring alternative lower-cost solutions to meet the demand for improved services on the front line. The opportunities for this are at hand with a no cost evaluation of alternatives to your existing infrastructure for mobile working. Let's look more closely at the savings that can be achieved simply by ensuring that user time is not wasted when they suffer connectivity loss through coverage gaps or when suspending a device to save battery life.

The Hidden Costs of Mobile Working

This spreadsheet below calculates the expected cost an organisation faces when their mobile workers lose data connections due to coverage gaps, switching network types, or a suspend/resume cycle between tasks.

Based on a typical salary, with cost overheads, and an assumed rate of help desk calls, the expenses attributable to lost connectivity are shown below.

The significance of the cost savings on an infrastructure that can eliminate these interruptions for an end user, whilst offering GSi CoCo compliant security for data in transit is compelling, irrespective of the organisation size.

If an end user is reconnecting unnecessarily 5 times each day, it adds up to between two and three weeks of lost productivity per year, per user!

So - what can be done to recoup these costs and use this spend more effectively? Click on the links in the eight point plan below for more detail on what you can do right away to alleviate this wastage.

The Eight Point Mobile Working Plan

Harness these cost savings to extend the mobile working rollout within existing budget funding

1. Quick & Easy Deployment
   of a no cost evaluation to quantify savings in your organisation - proven in many other public sector customers in the UK & worldwide
2. Achieve secure connections across any network
   - invisible to end users
3. Implement seamless network roaming
   - without end user interruptions
4. Ensure all applications keep running
   through coverage gaps, network roaming and device suspend/resume cycle
5. Optimize applications performance
   on poorer wireless connections - decrease reports of poor coverage through improved wireless tolerance
6. Detailed logging and reporting
   of statistics on wireless activity - turn the lights on for network utilisation, device usage, applications, and users
7. Ensure the integrity of the trusted corporate network
   with dynamic network access control to ensure only clean devices gain access
8. Manage Mobile Productivity and Security

Conclusion

The links above offer a start point with minimal effort and no additional investment.

The plan is designed to help find and quantify cost savings within existing budgets to drive efficiencies, staff time savings and productivity benefits promised by the mobile working investments your organisation has already made, or may be planning.

In closing, let's remind ourselves of pitfalls to avoid when rolling out a mobile solution. We have gathered these from some 2,000 customers with around 500,000 mobile user that take our product to work every day as their secure lifeline back to the organisation.

Pitfall number 1: Never neglect the needs of mobile users in the field - technology should not distract from the task at hand

Pitfall number 2: Creating an inconsistent mobile environment - ensure that users enjoy a similar working experience irrespective of device type or network type being used (whether in the office or not)

Pitfall number 3: Mobile device selection - ensuring that the device is not just selected for the short term needs of one project, but is capable of servicing future opportunities for mobile working efficiencies

Pitfall number 4: Believing security is not important, and can be left to the end of the project - not only are security leaks costly and organisationally damaging, a poorly-conceived security regimen imposes incremental (and unnecessary) tasks on the end user, robbing efficiencies and imposing incremental hidden cost burdens

Pitfall number 5: Settling on a hardcoded/customized solution for a single application - select an infrastructure that will support any applications in the field, rather than being limited by the mobile component of a single application

Pitfall number 6: Being the first to try new technologies - ensure that any claims by the supplier can be validated both within your own organisation and by broader acceptance within your industry sector

Pitfall number 9: Forgetting the big picture - look beyond the immediate project to the longer term aims of the organisation, and envision mobile working in the broader context. Ensure that any selected solution can future proof the organisation to allow use of cheaper or better new wireless technologies, and exploit new mobile working opportunities across the organisation

Pitfall number 10: Not including the ability to measure and manage mobile working - the old adage 'if you cannot measure, you cannot manage' holds true here. A mobile working project must include the ability to report on networks, devices, users and applications that are, to all intents and purposes, invisible to the organisation for much of the time. Not only should the infrastructure support measurement and reporting, but ideally proactive alerts should be provided for critical business thresholds.

If you would like us to come and help you implement implement a no cost evaluation of our software for your organisation, please click here and for us to contact you