Born to roam free

Employees are increasingly abandoning their desks and embracing a more nomadic way of working using Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) technology to free them from the typical nine to five grind. Duncan Jefferies examines if this technology is advanced enough yet to allow substantial numbers of financial services employees to truly roam free or if mobility is set to remain a minority interest for the time being

One telephone number, one voicemail, constant availability – this is the promise of Fixed Mobile Convergence, which aims to free financial workers from their desks by doing away with fixed phone lines for good. FMC is the heart of any true mobility strategy but, as yet, it is still a developing technology. There are currently two main types of solutions available; WiFi or GSM. WiFi services rely on dual mode mobile handsets that can support both the wide-area (cellular) access and the local-area technology (for VoIP). The theory is that the cellular service engages once the WiFi signal deteriorates in order to provide continuous coverage, but typically 100 per cent reliability is not yet achievable.

According to Aphrodite Brinsmead, an associate analyst at the consultants Datamonitor, there is still a way to go before WiFi FMC is a viable solution for most financial organisations. “Vendors are still working on developing it,” she says. “The uptake hasn’t been great, as the technology to switch seamlessly between a cellular and WiFi environment just isn’t really there yet.”

Whereas the vast majority of vendors currently offer WiFi-based FMC because of the future promise of enhanced functionality, Cable & Wireless decided to go with GSM instead. “There’s a number of reasons why we did that,” explains Phillip Grannum, head of product management at Cable & Wireless. “The main one was voice quality, which with GSM is already 100 per cent proven. There is also an international regulatory body for GSM standards, whereas a WiFi network is relatively straight forward to hack into and doesn’t have the long history of proven use that GSM does.”

Cable & Wireless secured a low-power UK GSM spectrum licence in May 2006, which allows the company to put in place dedicated mobile infrastructure in buildings using standard GSM technology. The service works with any GSM mobile handset, negating the need for dual-band phones. While connected to the in-building network, calls are carried over the Cable & Wireless IP network. “All we need to do is swap the SIM card over and you’re up and running,” says Grannum.

Consistent voice quality is crucial to the success of any FMC solution. Cable & Wireless has a five year roaming agreement with Orange which is supposed to provide seamless coverage when the phone is out of range of their in-building network. “You could walk out into the car park half-way through a call, get in your car and drive off, and nobody would be any the wiser about the switchover,” claims Grannum.

The company recently conducted a trial of their FMC solution with 100 workers of a major UK financial organisation. The vendor claims that a post-trial survey showed that 90 per cent of the end users would now be happy to replace their fixed phone and use only their mobile device in the future.

FMC installations are complex however and moving beyond trials to meaningful widespread deployments still presents a big challenge to most financial institutions, particularly in regard to integrating existing voice and data networks. As Grannum explains, there are also often corporate culture challenges to be overcome. “Normally the fixed line estate is looked after by one set of IT managers, with the mobile estate looked after by another set. A lot of the work we do is about bridging the gaps between these groups when the fixed and mobile estates are merged [and getting them to work effectively].”

Diversionary tactics
Phone systems have long been able to divert a call from a fixed line to a mobile phone. But ultimately when the call leaves the office environment, control over it is lost. “We think it is smarter to leave the desk phone in control of a call, and just make a bridge to the mobile phone,” says Chris Barrow, a solutions marketing manager at the vendor Avaya, which has been working on FMC solutions for the past three years.

There are immediate benefits to such a system for financial institutions that have to record calls, thanks to the regulations laid out by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). “Due to the fact that the desk phone is always in control of the call, it will still be recorded even when extended to a mobile phone, ensuring compliance.”

According to Barrow, simply giving people Blackberry’s or other mobile devices is not a true mobility strategy. “Some organisations think, ‘I’ve got 500 people out on the road, therefore I’ll buy 500 Blackberry’s for them and that’s my mobility strategy sorted,’ but of course it’s not because if those devices aren’t connected to the office phone system, calls can’t be recorded.”

A mobile workforce increasingly demands greater functionality from their mobile devices. Financial workers on the wholesale and investments markets for instance are now able to keep continuously informed of market developments via their phone. Avaya has developed software for traders or wealth managers, which enables call control features such as six-party conferencing and call transfer from a mobile. “If you were out on the road and needed to ring a key client about his stock portfolio, for example, you can force your mobile phone to dial through your desk extension so that the call will be recorded,” says Barrow. Your firm is then protected from any regulatory comeback or possible fines.

Unified strategy
Unified communications solutions are possibly the next step for financial institutions who want to optimise the ‘contactability’ of their mobile workers. The term, which describes an old ambition in a new way, is used to describe the integration of disparate systems, media, devices and applications – such as voice, email, instant messaging, video conferencing, web conferencing – into a single environment.

“In order to support home workers, a combination of mobility and unified communications solutions needs to be deployed to allow them to work effectively with colleagues in different locations,” says Datamonitor’s Brinsmead.

Being able to see someone’s ‘contactability’ across a range of mediums is the lynchpin of a unified communications strategy. “It’s about removing the human latency from business processes,” claims Barrow. “Anyway that people interact with one another throughout the organisation can be brought under the unified communications umbrella. You just click on a person’s name and let the technology figure out the best way to contact them.”

Of course, depending on your definition of what true mobility is, this could just be the same aim described in a different way but the benefits of a truly free workforce are obvious in terms of less commuting time, more freedom for employees and, hopefully, more motivated staff. The possible downside is that employees may feel that they are never able to switch off and may fall pray to the so-called ‘crackberry’ syndrome of feeling nervous if they’re out of touch. Good training and clear ‘to do’ lists from employees could help to solve this potential problem though.

Under the ‘unified’ concept, a server collects information on the presence of individual employees across different locations and presents this to anyone wishing to contact them. It requires intelligent software in order to work effectively – just because someone’s status is set to offline on a messaging application, it does not automatically mean they are away from their desk. “They could have forgotten to log in, or their WiFi connection could be down,” says Barrow. In this case, the server can look so see whether there is activity on their network port or if their mobile is switched on in order to build up an accurate ‘contactability’ picture.” The technology is in place, it is just the will to use it in widespread adoptions that is currently lacking.

Getting thin
Security concerns and FSA regulations about accessing sensitive data from outside the corporate perimeter environment still represent a major hurdle for many mobile workforce strategies. For financial companies looking to introduce mobility into their workforces easily, mobile thin clients may just provide an answer. Mobile workers are given thin clients, which look similar to a laptop, that pull applications and data from a centralised server. The thin client has no disk drives or storage facilities whatsoever, meaning that as well as being extremely portable, it is useless to thieves seeking bank customers’ personal details, without access to the server. “It facilitates home working initiatives,” claims Andrew Gee, sales manager for remote client solutions EMEA, Hewlett Packard, “and it does so in a compliant manner.”

The financial services sector has however been one of the slowest traditional markets to move towards mobile thin clients. The Achilles heel of the technology has always been network connectivity – lose that and you lose access to all your applications and data. But with the prevalence of wireless networks in the home, broadband, and the increased deployment of 3G and other connectivity technologies, mobile thin clients are rapidly becoming a more viable solution. The traditional laptop devices used with this approach may not be portable enough for some end users however so some firms are still wanting for more effective and functionally rich mobile phones and PDAs to come on to the market before taking the plunge.

In terms of its advantages though, HP’s Gee believes that: “From a users perspective, you simply switch on the machine, log-in and that’s it, you are ready to go. At that point, mobile thin client technology becomes almost like a piece of glass between you and the server, which is where all your interaction comes from.”

Recent research carried out by HP on 800 UK workers from across various different sectors, including the financial services industry, purports to show that offering employees the choice of whether to work at home or in the office raises employees productivity and IQ levels. Stress levels of the representative sample fell by more than 50 per cent when workers where given the choice as to how and when they worked, and productivity increased by up to 400 per cent. If these benefits can be passed on to an entire workforce, simply by introducing mobility, then it is understandable that financial organisations wish to explore it.

Problems remain though if wide scale adoption programmes are to be introduced. Firstly, the current generation of mobile devices do not yet offer the same degree of functionality as a desktop environment, and then there are issues regarding data security, voice quality and consistent network coverage. As the technology improves the drive toward a mobile workforce will no doubt increase, but for now it seems that the majority of financial workers, particularly outside the wholesale banking arena, will have to suffer the daily commute for a while yet. The truly nomadic workforce is still some way off.

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