The difference between what sounds good and what actually works in the field is the difference between the predictable environment of a demonstration and the chaos of real life. "There will be days," said George Bayz, president and CEO of Thinque Systems, "when your field representative wants to finish up and get home to coach basketball practice. He'll want to fill in the data that he can only capture on the customer's site, then complete the call report later."
If mobile applications lock their users into a fixed and cumbersome workflow, warned Bayz, "your people will throw their laptop PCs in the back seat and leave them there until their calls are doneâ€"then try to reconstruct their entire day later." When mobile applications become an added burden, instead of fitting into workers' routines, the result is more work, not less: Workers continue to use pen-and-paper methods, for their flexibility as well as their reliability under field conditions, while redundantly (perhaps inaccurately) re-entering data for online reports.
Thinque's approach to mobile application design encourages developers to be fine-grained in their data-entry requirements. The company's Call Report Builder software enables many levels of constraint: A data-entry field may be restricted to certain data types, as in the typical data-capture development tool, but it can also embody multilevel rules as to which entry fields must be completed before other parts of a report may be prepared.
If certain values in one entry field imply restrictions on the values of other fields, those rules travel with the report form definition. Violations of entry rules can be detected on the mobile device, without waiting for server-side logic to detect the problem during a later upload.
"Sometimes, the worker won't be connected," Bayz said, no matter what visions people may offer of pervasive wireless networks. Systems have to allow for offline operation with deferred connection.
Bayz dismissed the idea of calling any winners in the race to equip the mobile worker with wireless connections: "The important competition isn't between Palm and Windows CE: It's between all mobile IT on the one hand and the morning FedEx envelope on the other."
For most workers, he emphasised, mobile IT hardware has been too cumbersome, and applications too rigid, to make mobile IT fit readily into a busy mobile worker's routine. Bayz's comments bring to mind a 20-year-old dictum from personal computing visionary Alan Kay: "A portable computer is one that you can carry along with something else: say, two bags of groceries."
