By Computerworld Philippines Staff
July 1, 2010

Employee mobility has proven to be very effective in enabling many businesses to flourish. But the practice has its pros and cons, especially in managing an infrastructure that gives workers remote access to corporate information.

At Computerworld Philippines’ recent CIO Roundtable, various issues were discussed concerning the management of mobile workers – employees and staff that are sent to the field and armed with mobile devices such as laptops and smartphones. The issues tackled include employee productivity, customer service, and IT security.

For Carlo Cagalingan, head of information technology at insurance firm AXA Philippines, having mobile workers help a lot in building rapport with customers.

“In the insurance industry, transactions are more on the personal level. Naturally, no one can do that sitting behind a desk – so mobility is key,” relates Cagalingan.

The same sentiment was shared by Rene Apetrior, assistant vice president-EDP of Travellers Insurance and Surety Corp., who argues that “workforce mobilization has become a key competitive requirement for most organizations seeking to create greater intimacy and presence with customers.”

Meanwhile, Joel Galit, senior IT manager of Victoria Court, shares they also have a mobile work group that work on tie-ups with potential business partners.

Galit, whose company is expanding its hospitality franchise business, recognizes the importance of having mobility in the business. In fact, the company’s IT group aims to have an enterprise system that is available 24 x 7.

The other issues raised during the roundtable include choosing the right technologies to take advantage of the mobile workforce as well as some policies needed to be applied to address issues on productivity and security.

In the meeting, former roundtable participant Rene De Guzman, vice president for IT services department of the National Reinsurance Corporation of the Philippines (NRCP), served as moderator for the discussion. Clarence Phua, ASEAN regional sales manager of Sophos was also there to represent the event’s sponsor.

EXCERPTS OF THE ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION FOLLOWS:

Computerworld: What factors are contributing to the growth of your mobile workforce?
Cagalingan: The insurance industry is more personal. The insurance agents sometimes really have to go to your house, to your office or call you on your cellphone. And so the transactions are more on the personal level and that’s key to selling our products. Naturally, no one can do that sitting behind a desk – so mobility is key. Another factor is our business targets. Our vision is to be the preferred company in the insurance business. And one way to do that is we need to increase the channels where our clients can transact or relate with AXA. We have to increase that number of our agents, and to increase their number, increasing the support they need is also mandatory. These, I believe, are the factors that contribute to the growth of our mobile workforce.

Apetrior: The availability and adoption of mobile technology has a significant impact on growth of the mobile workforce. It acts as an enabler for job functions that otherwise could not be mobile – like in the case of office-based workers that telecommute from home, part-time or full-time.

Workforce mobilization has become a key competitive requirement for most organizations seeking to create greater intimacy and presence with customers. However, enabling mobility is more than just providing laptops and mobile phones to users and sending them out into the field. It’s about selecting the appropriate technologies and developing the right user experience so users can be productive and take advantage of this new work paradigm. This is why the extending of key business applications like CRM to increasingly ubiquitous smartphone environments such as BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices have become critical to successfully tapping the mobile workforce.

Computerworld: Is the growth of the mobile workforce relative to the growth of the size of your employee population? Is it always consistent? Do you always give a one-to-one infrastructure?
Cagalingan: Not exactly. It’s more on the growth of the business and not on the workforce. We do the infrastructure assessment per area and volume of business. What our agents have is a target number of clients or a target number of policies in a month. That’s why mobile IT support is geared toward those targets. It should not be on agent one-to-one correspondence – that’s too cost-inefficient.

Galit: It’s not related because we don’t have direct sales force that go out of the branch just to make sales. But we have a similar workforce that goes out of a branch to meet potential business partners. For example, the marketing group, they go to call centers, they go to some companies to establish tie-ups. I think those are the much-related ones with the mobile workforce.

De Guzman: I guess in my experience, the need for a mobile workforce goes beyond just trying to reach customers. Because customers will always try to reach out even outside office hours and so it somehow creates the demand for a mobile infrastructure.

Apetrior: I believe the increase in the choice of telecommunications networks and service providers available to the business communities and the public in general helps realize competitive retail prices, and create an environment which encourages investment in the telecommunications sector. This results in improving the quality and range of service, especially in the most challenged areas of the country.

Computerworld: Is there a certain standard or policy that sets out the rules for a mobile infrastructure?

Cagalingan: In AXA, we do have our own set of guidelines or rules for the mobile workforce. It primarily concerns information security. It is a big concern since data can be in transit. The set of rules and guidelines revolve on issues like information security, equipment security, as well equipment recovery. Things like how would you protect company data if you lose laptops or BlackBerries? We can only do so much with the policies, the rest will depend on how people view the importance of security. That facet we cannot fully control. We have a saying in AXA, that goes: “Information security is not just IT’s responsibility – it’s everyone’s responsibility.” We do a lot of trainings, a lot of orientations for people who go out and transact with clients.

Computerworld: Mr. Galit, although you don’t have a mobile workforce, was there an occasion wherein the network was exposed outside, like maybe when your president is interested to work from home and needs connection?

Galit: Before I joined the company four years ago, our transactions were being done manually. We had to go to the branches to manually get the data, copy, and transport them to the head office for consolidation. Now what we have done is place an infrastructure which we call the Red Max or Red Bang line. We’ve connected all our locations using WiMax technology with a speed of 9Mbps. With the technology, we are able to consolidate all data from all locations; at the same time do online transactions with all the branches. For our business partners, we’ve developed an online business application which they can access through the web. For example, guests of Victoria Court can make reservations online. We now have three applications that are now available online, and we are in the process of putting more applications online. Eventually, two years from now, all our applications will be available online.

Computerworld: Mr. Cagalingan, have you encountered other specific challenges?

Cagalingan: Aside from information security, data accuracy is a challenge. Since transactions are done face-to-face, how do we keep information synchronized with what we have in the main office? Another would be monitoring or tracking of mobile workers—how would we know if they are really working? Other challenges would be support issues. How can we solve a problem in Davao or in Zamboanga when there’s no IT support? So we’re also faced with turnaround problems. We believe that to have a very effective sales team, a very good support mechanism must be in place, just like the U.S. army because they have good intelligence and the right equipment. So what we’re trying to do is strengthen IT’s support capabilities to enhance the company’s sales and business growth.

Rene De Guzman: That I suppose is a big challenge—strengthening the IT organization’s support. I guess from my experience, the perception of other managers is that these are just appliances that can be easily bought from a store, like the computers, laptops, or mobile phones. But what they probably don’t know is that you must have a strategic program for your applications, for the strategies and goals of the organization to be consistent with the way they use the tools.

Cagalingan: Sustainability is also one part of that. You have to have the support of the organization for your people to do their job. Simply put, they have to have those tools in order to do their jobs.

Computerworld: For the trainings, do you do them consistently with the HR organization or is it purely an IT initiative?
Cagalingan: We share that with HR and even our sales group; they have their own sales training group. So HR, sales training, and IT.

Computerworld (Rene De Guzman): That’s good to know. I suppose in your organization IT is strategically positioned similar to sales and HR. How many mobile workers do you have?
Cagalingan: Probably more than 1,000.

Galit: More than 25.

Computerworld: How do you make sure that your mobile networks are secure? How do you integrate personal mobile technology, such as cell phones and home WLANs, with company firewalls?

Galit: For us, we have certain rules when using those technologies. For example, the company issued laptops for certain employees are made sure they are fully secured and monitored. Similarly, the company also issued mobile phones, but they’re not used mainly for transacting data via mobile but for communication purposes only.

Cagalingan: For AXA, I cannot really mention the exact brands that we use but we do have a set of technologies in place to manage and monitor the mobile infrastructure. We do encrypt our laptops, we do have our own private network in our head office. We have partnerships with PLDT to hook up our 400-plus branches across the nation, so that’s very secure.

Computerworld: It’s a challenge for most IT organizations in terms of managing the personal equipment of the employees. Do you also protect the network against employees using their own personal PCs and phones?

Galit: Inside the company, we don’t allow the use of personal laptops. We also have a firewall that prevents unauthorized access to our networks.

Computerworld: I guess that’s also a challenge to the organization. How do you distinguish devices owned by them and those issued by the company?

Cagalingan: In AXA we do have our own brands. So we stick to Dell, we stick to Lenovo. We know what models are given to the agents and to the employees. We also have a policy regulating the use of personal phones and laptops in the office. They have to fill in a form before we let them use the devices. But we also try to balance these things.

Computerworld: So it’s not all just software and hardware; there’s also procedures, training of people and cooperation?

Cagalingan: We try to not to be too strict with the working environment because we are in a relationship business. We try to always have a very good working relationship with our employees as well to our clients. So there’s a balance.

Computerworld: What kind of applications have evolved into mobile apps and how are they being managed?

Cagalingan: We do have our own systems in place, mostly webbased for distributor information such as agent information, policy information, and customer information that are readily available for our agents and to our clients through the Web.

Galit: We have implemented several systems via the Web that our employees can access even if they are not in the office. They can access, for example, the system for filing leaves. Before, they have to fill up a form or go to the office to file those things, but now, since it’s in the Web already, they can file it online. So even if they are at home, they can file from there. At the same time, the direction of our IT group is directed towards having an enterprise system that is available 24/7, which we hope to achieve in two to three years’ time.

Computerworld: Is working from home something that you encourage in your organization?

Galit: Eventually. But we have to prepare our infrastructure first, we have to ramp up the security and the systems.

Cagalingan: Same with the insurance industry. I think it’s part and parcel of the mobile workforce. So if you’re mobile, sometimes—or most of the time—you’ll be at home, you’ll talk to your neighbors, so sometimes you do those transactions at home.

Galit: The only challenge to that is productivity, because when you are working at home you must have a system where you can still measure their productivity.

Computerworld (De Guzman): In the IT organization, there are systems in place such as the online bundy clocks. Some companies might be using these tools as a way to measure their productivity as well, right?

Galit: Maybe the best way is the output-based measure that will deliver these results in a specified time. That can be a measure of your productivity.

Computerworld: If you don’t log in during the entire day probably that’s an indication that you did not work at all?

Galit: The problem is, you can log in anytime, but are you really working?

Computerworld: Is SaaS also something that you see growing in terms of applications being made available to mobile workers?

Cagalingan: Yes and no. Yes, because the cost benefit analysis for this one is really great but in a period of, let’s say, a number of years, you could have outgrown the investments that you made initially. It’s still being analyzed within the Metrobank group but yes, it is being considered.

Computerworld: Mr. Cagalingan, you mentioned that your mobile applications are confidential. Could you at least share to us what types of mobile applications you have and how they enable your mobile workforce?

Cagalingan: Our sales force team is really out there and so they are transacting the business face-to-face. So when I go to an existing client and say, “Your investment is now at this level, maybe you can go to a higher portion.” But how would I know that? How would I know that my client’s investment is now at this level and he can go to a much higher level? So that’s one application that we did for those sales people, so they can have a very accurate data information system. When they go to the client, they just pop out the laptop, connect to the Internet, and get all those information and talk to the clients. We also have these financial needs analysis application. For example, one agent would say, “Your kid is now eight years old, in the next five years he will go to high school. Would you like to go for an educational plan?” That sort of information is really being fed all out to our distributors, so all of our mobile applications are geared towards that. That’s why information security is important. You know, once the agent resigns, it’s automatic for the system to close out all those information.

Galit: What we have is an infrastructure that allows mobile phones to link to our system so they can access data such as room rates. So if someone asks me for the room rates, I’d be able to give them the information immediately. Guests can also see a sample video of the rooms through my cellphone. For our online reservation system, from time to time, we update the room rates and the promos of the motels and hotels we have. There is an outsourced service provider that handles the updates for us.

Computerworld: What technologies do you use to manage or monitor remote workers? Have they been effective?
Cagalingan: It’s a combination of technology, procedure, and process. I cannot really tell what we use for this one, but the basics are, of course, our mobile workforce has to report every day so they use the system on reporting what they did, what their plans are for the day as well as for the next day. That sort of systems are in place, and they use a certain application for that. We have a combination of a web application and a telecommunications infrastructure in coordination with Globe Telecom. It’s tedious for the agents, because you really have to text this very long report.

Galit: For us, it’s also a combination of policies and procedures— and technology.

Possibly Related Posts:

• IT Budgets on the Rise
• Veering into Virtualization
• Moving Through the Supply Chain
• BUSINESS AS USUAL: Picking up where you left
• Mitigating the Risks

 Print This Post