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The Growth of the Mobile Workforce Complicates Support

The growth of the mobile and remote workforce has made responsibility for remote support complex and strained for IT professionals. According to an October 2005 analysis done by IDC, the number of remote and mobile workers reached 650 million worldwide in 2004. IDC predicts that, over the next five years, that number will reach 850 million - more than one quarter of the global workforce.¹ The remote workforce, while once a trend, is now the new reality support professionals must face.

Affirmations of this new reality abound. A 2005 study done by BPM Forum found that 71% of the 400-plus participating enterprise executives and managers expect their percentage of remote workers to increase - a finding consistent across a variety of industries, regardless of company size.²

Tech Republic also published the results of a 2006 study of 370 IT and business professionals, 75% of whom viewed extending business applications to mobile and remote workers as a high priority.³ For their part, remote workers are coming to expect the same access as local employees to applications and internal resources.

The growing number of mergers and acquisitions further augments the size of the remote and global workforce. Mergers create particular headaches for IT professionals who bear the responsibility of fusing multiple platforms, applications and security infrastructures into a functioning network. Even the most pristine IT infrastructure becomes flawed the minute one company merges with another.

Despite these complications, support of these remote workers is pivotal. In the BPM Forum study, 92% of managers link the performance of remote workers directly to the quality of IT support.⁴ Acknowledging the vitality of this connection, however, has not yet adequately improved the quality of IT support. As many as 55% of these managers viewed the quality of their support as C-grade or lower, and up to 40% had already suffered business disruption as a direct result of ineffective support.⁵

Such downtime already costs companies millions of dollars annually. All of the studies cited above reveal major concerns about security and compliance, capital expenditures, the expense of ongoing technical support and the support and management of extended applications. Lack of IT resources is also an issue as companies anticipate the increase in security threats, errors and vulnerabilities in remote operating systems and software, along with the general shift to a more IT-oriented business model. For companies accustomed to traditional support methods, the rapid growth of the mobile remote workforce demands a new paradigm. The new reality needs a new approach.

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1. IDC, October 2005, Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2005-2009 Forecast and Analysis
2. BPI Forum, 2005, The Remote Revolution: Uptime Issues, Implications and Imperatives in the Mobile Workforce
3. Tech Republic, February 2006, Enabling the Mobile Workforce: Issues and Trends
4. BPI Forum, 2005, The Remote Revolution: Uptime Issues, Implications and Imperatives in the Mobile Workforce
5. Ibid.

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