Mobile Virtual Work A New Paradigm phần 10 pdf

15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 353 product manufacturer’s de-structuring and concentrating on core compe- tencies. Mobile technologies for the automotive industry This situation has important implications for the automotive product de- sign and engineering process. As product costs are incurred in all stages of the life cycle, including maintenance, product development must more and more be dealt with in terms of life cycle and total ownership cost. Time to market has become an important competitive factor. Overall, the complex- ity of the product and of its handling has enormously increased compared to a few years ago. To cope with this situation, the organisation of the product development process is changing. To be able to handle the holistic view of the product development process and the geographic dispersion of actors involved, companies are experimenting with distributed forms of the design and engineering process. This has various organisational implica- tions. There is an increasing need to support ad-hoc collaboration proc- esses such as unplanned meetings. Also, more robust control and supervi- sion systems with corresponding workspaces will be necessary to coordinate multi-location working and to adapt assembly lines to changing customer needs and car usage information. Additionally, as innovation cuts across the product life cycle, adequate inter-related workspaces for each type of engineering activity are becoming a necessity. As regards to mobile collaborative working, it can be foreseen that multi-location distributed forms of work organisation will be important to support collaborative product development tasks. Mobile technologies will allow the team members to join such collaborative product development activities at anytime from anywhere, offering greater work flexibility. Fur- thermore, organisations can improve the efficiency of their production processes by using smart electronic tags to support better logistics within the supply chain. Mobile technologies will be of high importance in sup- porting business processes such as remote field service e.g. remote car di- agnosis, maintenance and repair, and road assistance, in relations man- agement and sales, and in management and coordination. 15.4.2 Aerospace industry The aerospace industry is under pressure from their customers to produce better quality, safer and cheaper products in ever-shorter periods. To meet these targets, similar to the automotive industry, the aerospace industry has embraced the concurrent engineering (CE) principles within their product 354 Hans Schaffers et al. life cycle. A CE approach encourages developers to consider all aspects of the product’s life cycle from its conception through to disposal, including user requirements, cost, quality and maintenance. Parallel development of products may reduce considerably the time required for product develop- ment. CE promotes the introduction of specialist knowledge from the downstream product life cycle stages during design. By addressing issues such as manufacturing, assembly and maintenance in early stages, CE aims to reduce unforeseen problems creeping into the design as it progresses through its life cycle. Consequently, CE can save both time and money while improving product quality. The aerospace industry consists of truly distributed virtual organisations that have complex characteristics compared to other sectors. Such charac- teristics include number of partners, i.e. the Airbus network, complexity of the product, i.e. number of components and related disciplines, size of the organisation including equipment manufacturers, risk-sharing partners, suppliers and sub-contractors, long lead times, and huge capital needs for developing products. For example, Airbus has about 150 sites throughout the world with distributed manufacturing facilities in France, Germany, UK and Spain. It works with an international network of about 1,500 sup- pliers in more than 30 countries. As a result, this sector needs efficient col- laborative tools and processes to work as a distributed virtual organisation. In the past years, the aerospace industry has moved from a discipline- based organisation (based on the different departments within a design of- fice) to a process- or program-based organisation. As a result, people from several design office disciplines are gathered in co-located platforms (the product integrated teams) together with representatives from manufactur- ing and support engineering, during the product development phase. In the future, due to the need of higher responsiveness to market demands and to reach another significant step in term of costs, cycle time and quality, a more agile and adaptive organisation is expected. In this organisation the engineering process will be distributed among a variety of knowledge teams in a network or “mesh-like” structure. Mobile technologies for the aerospace sector The drive for concurrent engineering and reduced product lead times has lead to the development of secure shared working environments connect- ing the project partners, supply chain and the customer. The challenge is that it is still difficult to truly collaborate in a virtual environment and many design engineers still travel to take advantage of the rich communi- cation environment offered by face-to-face meetings. This means the re- quirements for mobile working are even greater. 15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 355 A significant step towards remote or mobile working has been the use of digital mock-ups (DMUs). This has made a dramatic difference to the abil- ity of project stakeholders to have access to and visibility of the required data and information. DMUs allow sharing of, for example, product break down structures and visibility of conflicts highlighted by geometries. This has meant shared decision making, better impact assessment as well as more accurate design for assembly and maintenance. The next steps are to allow sharing and brokering of analysis tools, access to product data man- agement systems, and the use of ontologies to allow the exchange of mean- ingful information from databases. As in the automotive industry, mobile technologies can be used to support the design phase and the production phase, allowing greater work flexibility and better logistics. Similarly, smart electronic devices can be used to monitor the performance of aero- engines and support predictive maintenance of aircrafts, saving millions of Euros for companies. 15.4.3 Building and construction industry The building and construction industry is known to change at a very slow pace with little investment in ICT to enhance their work processes. In the building and construction process many partners play a role and it has a fragmented nature. The project organisation is created for each project. This means that in most cases different experts such as designers don’t know each other and have not yet worked together when the project starts. The operating environment is a building site with no permanent infrastruc- ture or factory-like services. The traditional procurement mode is based on minimizing capital costs instead of optimizing performance. This gives little incentives for product or process innovation. There are some new contracting models in use ex- tending the suppliers’ responsibility and interest towards the long service life of buildings. Until now the main contractors have mainly been respon- sible to deliver the facility with a very short guarantee period, a year or two. In the future, if the main supplier e.g. contractor is ready to take the responsibility of operating and maintaining the building for the coming decades, it will certainly lead to organisational changes and new service concepts based on value networks. Given the rapidly changing market environment, higher demands of as- set managers and conscious users, single suppliers cannot provide the re- quested whole life performance and services alone in a sustainable way. The mistrust between client and supplier needs to be transformed into partnerships. The sub-optimized management of a changing chain of cheap 356 Hans Schaffers et al. subcontractors or suppliers and project based profit maximization must be developed to a value network providing sustainable business opportunities for those who are both willing and capable to improve their performance. In short, the transition from today’s lose-lose business model to a win-win one is highly desirable. The open market and the growth of the Community, combined with the unstable local markets, require the industry to seek international work and collaboration. Most of the key players in the national markets are already involved in international activities. These activities are either based on subsidiaries or strategic partnerships. Many of the companies are not trained in international collaboration and the management are neither structured nor complemented to address the challenges. Mobile technologies for the building and construction industry Similar to the automotive and the aerospace industries, the building and construction sector needs to bring together large number of geographically dispersed partners to design, construct and maintain a building. The use of mobile technology during the design phase could allow partners to interact with each other in a much more flexible way to work more efficiently. Some examples of the use of mobile technology during the construction phase include access to design data to clarify construction tasks, safety monitoring of workers and the use of smart electronic tags to support lo- gistics and resource monitoring. The construction sector is also exploring the benefits of using mobile technology in the service phase of the build- ing. Typical mobile force applications in the construction industry do equip the engineer with a mobile device, which is linked to the central dis- patch and data system of the company. The mobile application can support the engineer in a multitude of processes which makes them independent from a physical office and offers the remote field worker total mobility. These applications are now in their initial stages in medium and large en- terprises in the construction industry. The impact on costs becomes clearly visible, when we think of the number of remote engineers and the volume of the installed base, i.e. the number of sites to be served. For example, for a medium sized company in Switzerland, which was monitoring heating systems in 200.000 sites using more than 250 technicians, the introduction of such a solution decreased administration cost by 70%. In the future, ser- vices like elevators, heating systems and security systems can be equipped with mobile technologies for ongoing communication with central surveil- lance systems, ensuring continuous controlling and monitoring and data availability for maintenance and security. Although the industry has started in the mid nineties to centralize the development and standardization of e- 15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 357 and m-technologies, the current state of the industry still needs to over- come structural challenges in order to allow stronger penetration of mobile technologies within its business processes. 15.4.4 Prospects for new ways of mobile working From this overview of industry developments it can be concluded that in- dustry drivers determining the potential of mobile workplaces are quite different in any of the sectors. In the automotive sector mobility seems to be primarily a competitive factor in support of processes like sales and re- lations management and to facilitate mobile access to data for engineering purposes. Multi-location work could be the primary direction of develop- ment. In the aerospace sector the situation is different as operations and maintenance are crucial business processes and mobility of airplanes is their natural characteristic. Mobile and collaborative working matches po- tentially very well with the underlying characteristics of the industry. In building and construction, the characteristic of complex projects and dis- persed and temporary teams provide good opportunities for mobile work- place technologies. It is also clear that the benefits of mobile collaborative working cannot be realized without inter-organisational restructuring. 15.5 Introducing mobile collaborative work What is a mobile organisation, and what are the key issues in introducing new mobile forms of working? A mobile organisation could be described as an organisation “…where people, processes, technology and manage- ment support work (are) done anyplace/anytime” (Neal 2003). This is a good description but does not indicate the variety of options that are possi- ble particularly with respect to groups and teams of people who need to collaborate with each other and to access data, information and tools to support their activities. The mobile organisation has to support not only individuals but also groups and teams who need to collaborate. In table 15.3, the true mobile organisation is described as highly collaborative, but acknowledges that co-located high performance teams are also important for success. A flexi- bility of approach is required that aims to support the collaboration proc- ess, to reduce unnecessary travel without creating further challenges for individuals, to enable people who are away from their ‘home base’ to carry on being effective and to allow individuals to make the best use of the time available to them to carry out both work and home commitments. 358 Hans Schaffers et al. Table 15.3. Collaboration and mobility Mobile Collection of mobile individuals The mobile organisation Static Collection of static individuals A high performance team Not collaborative Highly collaborative Ideally, the mobile organisation from an ICT perspective can be seen to have the following attributes: • No fixed working space. Working in the office is just another place for the worker to work and access to the network is available wherever he or she happens to be. Moreover, instead of the architect being in charge of creating a collaborative environment, the applications architect is now responsible. However, since 'office' spaces are now 'shared' spaces, and may be used for many different activities, considerable care still needs to be taken in designing workspaces in buildings. If the home be- comes a workplace too, equal attention should be paid to the design of that environment. There may also be running cost implications for workers working in places other than the traditional ‘office’, for exam- ple Internet connections, dial-in facilities or additional printers. • Internet-based processes. Processes are designed to be useful and acces- sible by both mobile workers and co-located workers, and administra- tive forms and procedures are available in electronic form, with applica- tions using the HTML-based browser. • Mobile technology. Technology is used seamlessly to enable any- place/anytime work. Different sorts of mobile devices can be used, and the choice of device is driven by user requirements rather than an or- ganisation wide decision. All ICT devices are supported. Mobile devices are always on, are always connected, have rapid response rates and reli- able connectivity, are light, small and non-intrusive, and most of all are not prohibitively expensive. Diversity of devices will incur costs – both in the hardware itself and in maintaining the skills and knowledge to support different systems and of course in the provision of 24hr support. The business plan needs to consider these elements and elaborate how the provision of technology will save costs and improve effectiveness. 15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 359 The positive aspects include more effective use of time, reduced down time, high levels of availability and employee satisfaction if they can be in better control of the way in which they achieve their goals. It is also important to consider some of the potential negative aspects too – these might include time clock changes - for example the time taken to reach decisions or complete processes, there is additional pressure to ensure that contributions have been made and views considered, and not least the challenge of ensuring that there is understanding across the team, adequate situation awareness of the activities and requirements of the team, and no isolation of individuals. • Management of mobility and mobile working culture. The organisation recognizes that mobile teams have different requirements and train their managers to motivate and manage mobile teams. Additionally, the or- ganisation appreciates issues of privacy and accessibility and develops protocols to help workers maintain a work / life balance. One step fur- ther would be the acceptance of a mobility culture: mobility being the norm, not exception. Many of the principles for a mobile organisation make sense for a more static or at least a mixed organisation too. But a mobile organisation is not just a collection of people with laptops, cell phones and pagers allowing people to take their office home after the “normal” working day. It is also not just a group of mobile workers bolted on to the standard organisation. However many organisations will not see a requirement to be entirely mo- bile and people may not work exclusively in one way all the time – this can be driven by individual preference, work life balance, or driven by pro- ject or task requirements. The role of the organisation and the type of work undertaken will also affect the type of choices of working environments open to an individual. The degree of choice is extremely variable across different industries, from engineering to telecommunications, and across domains from service industry e.g. health, consultancy, finance and insur- ance, to farming and other rural occupations. Mobility leads to changes in working practices - as well as new terms and conditions. These might include expense account changes i.e. mobile phone charges, remote connection charges, teleconferencing costs, video conferencing costs, attribution of cost to project versus overhead, costs for IT support 24 hours per day, additional costs where IT devices are not all standardized, and potential health and safety considerations where em- ployees are working outside the ‘normal’ working environment. In offer- ing the flexibility to work at home or wherever is appropriate for the indi- vidual, the organisation also needs to address the risk of making team members feel isolated, unaware and not engaged in the process. Co-located 360 Hans Schaffers et al. team members may also exhibit virtual characteristics, for example, people using e-mail to talk to someone in the next room, or sending texts to some- one in the same room. One often cited business goal is to 'improve productivity by leveraging knowledge'. This is potentially even more difficult if the organisation is virtual and its employees mobile. However the challenge is realizing this and using the very mobility to create social networks and to build rich knowledge and information flows across the organisation. Leveraging knowledge across a dispersed organisation is often difficult if not impossi- ble - not only because of the technical difficulties but also because of the politics and negative sharing ethos where knowledge still represents power rather than the other way round – i.e. sharing the knowledge creates the power. Knowledge and information documentation always runs behind its ac- quisition, and furthermore all knowledge will not be captured or shared in formal ways. For this reason, organisations are reliant on informal ad hoc meetings to spread the knowledge and experience. This is a challenge that needs to be met within the virtual mobile organisation. The socialization of knowledge, that is, the direct exchange of ideas in conversations and other interactions, both planned and unplanned, speeds up the exchange of knowledge allowing organisations to get more value from it. However, this takes place most readily when people are located in the same physical environment. With more mobile communities, it is still important to consider this requirement in the physical design of work spaces and to acknowledge different spaces are required for different types of work (Duffy 2000). Spontaneous interaction and ad-hoc meetings de- crease as distance between people increases but these spontaneous meet- ings have significant value. It is often only when we perceive a colleague that we think of issues that they can help us to solve, or even help us to frame the right questions to ask. Ambient intelligent systems bringing computing power everywhere, but in the “background”, may be one way of trying to support and facilitate these spontaneous interactions, but there may need to be cultural changes and training to enable individuals to suc- ceed. Changes to the physical working environment and solutions linking the virtual world with the physical show promise but are as yet immature in their implementation. We need to think now about the impacts of these new environments and to consider how they might be integrated into new processes and organisational structures. 15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 361 15.6 Towards a roadmap and innovation agenda 15.6.1 Future scenarios What about the future forms of collaborative mobile workplaces? In order to stretch current thinking and to envisage and visualize more radical di- rections and discuss them with policy makers and industrial stakeholders for the purpose of building a roadmap for innovation, a framework for mo- bile and collaborative working scenarios is proposed in figure 15.3. Self-organisation Coordination Business collaboration in self-coordinated value network e.g. SME-network in manufacturing Coordination and support of remote, distributed workers e.g. repair, maintenance Coordination of decentralised teams within a globally operating company e.g. research Collaboration of self- organising professionals in temporary teams e.g. healthcare, emergencies Individual Organisation Fig. 15.3. MOSAIC mobile working scenarios (Schaffers et al. 2005) Two key driving forces are recognized, the first is the focus of collabo- ration (individual versus organisational focus), and the second is the evolu- tion of organisations (coordination versus self-organisation), resulting in four scenario types highlighting different directions of innovation and change as regards working, collaboration and mobility. Such scenarios are not meant as forecasts or business cases but are de- veloped primarily to highlight the underlying fundamental forces in inno- vation and change with respect to work environments, and to discuss their implementation requirements in terms of technologies, organisational vari- 362 Hans Schaffers et al. ables, human behaviour, and policy conditions in order to build an innova- tion roadmap. The scenarios also enable us to recognize that mobile work is to be con- sidered at different levels: the worker, the workplace, the organisation and the organisational environment. Mobile work is a combination of technol- ogy, workplace organisation, (inter-) organisational procedures, and facili- ties and support systems allowing people to work at times and locations of choice. Mobile work involves not only a traditional meaning of ‘worker mobility’ focusing primarily on multiple work locations including the of- fice, home, hotspots, and on the move. Mobile work in a more extensive meaning would also and foremost include the mobility of the workplace and work organisation, increasingly following the needs and opportunities of the mobile worker and team irrespective time, place and other context- related constraints: the network may become the working place. The mo- bile workplace thus evolves towards a scenario of work organisation char- acterised by empowerment of workers and teams being part of ad-hoc temporary projects and organisations, and by awareness of context. Mobil- ity services enable the worker to roam through arbitrary environments irre- spective of network environments the user is in. Context awareness and context adaptiveness exploit the relevant worker context variables to tailor applications, services, communication and connectivity to the workplace and workers’ current situation and needs. Based on a discussion of future scenarios of mobile collaborative work- places it is possible to formulate a vision as regards a plausible and desir- able development path, and to translate that into a corresponding roadmap and innovation agenda. Such a vision and roadmap helps decision makers and technology providers by making explicit assumptions regarding rele- vant trends and developments, key challenges and milestones. 15.6.2 An initial roadmap for mobile collaborative workplaces The future of collaborative mobile workplaces will depend to a large ex- tent on economical factors affecting mobility: transportation costs, com- puting technology costs, end-user equipment costs and telecommunication costs. Although the steady decrease of transportation costs has been a long-term trend, an increase in oil prices and costs associated with security measures may result in an increase in transportation costs. Moore’s law, stating that the computing power available for a given price doubles every 18 months, is expected to hold at least for the next ten years. At the same time, battery life is expected to increase in a rapid pace. The telecommuni- cation technologies that are expected to be dominant in the next ten years [...]... social, learning, working More flexible Multi-cultural and learning, working More flexible Multi-cultural and work arrangements multi-lingual support multi-lingual support work arrangements Law unification Law unification Increasing globalisation Increasing globalisation of work and business of work and business Legal and work Legal and work Intelligent, adaptive Intelligent, adaptive safety issues safety... mobile virtual work Rather employees’ competence to cope with its precarious aspects should be improved Moreover, the quality of teamwork has an important impact not only on performance, but also on job satisfaction in virtual mobile teams Mobile virtual work in practice A case of a globally distributed corporation and four cases on team level in large enterprises show that mobile virtual work is already... Finally, we explored a framework of future mobile workplace scenarios, in order to understand the underlying forces of innovation and to build a realistic vision as a basis for innovation strategy On this basis a concrete roadmap of challenges and milestones in key areas of mobile working is proposed as a basis for an agenda for research and innovation that may enable business and policy stakeholders to structure... safety issues workplaces workplaces Social & legal aspects Mobility and work settings Communities of Communities of knowledge and practice knowledge and practice Mobile applications Secure ad-hoc Secure ad-hoc workplaces workplaces Tele-assistance Tele-assistance M-learning M-learning Communication Communication services services Human interaction with mobile apps Mobile Mobile workplaces workplaces Tele-medicine... mobile worker is the most active partner, who retrieves data from and sends data back to the central system However, standard data exchange also takes place in cases where centrally located employees retrieve data from sensors attached in one way or the other to mobile people Examples are the hospital personnel monitoring heart rate data from mobile patients, or fleet managers retrieving data concerning... of elaborating and refining the roadmap a concrete research and innovation agenda and strategy is being created By discussing the roadmap with a large group of practitioners from industry and academia we aim to create a realistic and broadly supported innovation agenda that can help decision makers and technology providers throughout Europe in making strategic decisions for systemic innovation in mobile. .. consistent with task characteristics, mobile virtual workers’ satisfaction appears to be highest T T Diffusion of mobile work and services Lindmark and colleagues have observed that in spite of the availability of fruitful applications for mobile work, there appeared to be many examples of slow adoption This was the more remarkable because the innovations provided tangible and often measurable benefits... sense, a formal mobile information system that requires a particular form of engagement to perform mobile virtual work will probably fail because it does not support existing practices and contexts The work itself is not virtual, but by making resources and technologies available, work can be conducted ‘as if normally’ 378 Matti Vartiainen and Erik Andriessen A large part of the connectivity that is... Obviously mobile interaction means generally the communication between a single worker and his or her home base Some part of a team seems always to be stationary, staying in one place It appears that the actual group work of, e.g design teams or project teams, is rarely performed by totally mobile group members However, many individually working mobile professionals appear to have contact now and then... physical space, which is layered with virtual and social/mental spaces of a subject This book is mainly about physically and virtually mobile individual subjects using distributed workplaces To some extent, mobile virtual collaborative work is also discussed Because of the systemic nature of mobile work, challenges arise for the design, development and management of this work system The system’s parts are . Introducing mobile collaborative work What is a mobile organisation, and what are the key issues in introducing new mobile forms of working? A mobile organisation could be described as an organisation. roadmap a concrete re- search and innovation agenda and strategy is being created. By discussing the roadmap with a large group of practitioners from industry and acade- mia we aim to create a. integrated into new processes and organisational structures. 15 Mobile Workplaces and Innovative Business Practice 361 15.6 Towards a roadmap and innovation agenda 15.6.1 Future scenarios What