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Jason Langridge, Microsoft

Continuing our series of interviews with key people in the mobile and flexible working industry, we talk to Jason Langridge, UK Mobility Business Manager at Microsoft. His role brings him into contact with both the public and private sector, and he has some interesting insights on the role of mobile working for tomorrow’s worker.

1. How do you feel the public and private sectors have differed in their uptake of mobile working?
The private sector is embracing it widely, and we’ve seen some verticals move much further ahead than others. Both the retail and the service sectors are using it extensively and inventively, primarily because they have recognised the role it can play both in gaining competitive advantage and in reducing costs.
We haven’t seen the same levels of take up in the public sector, and I believe this is because there aren’t the same competitive pressures. But encouragingly there are some pockets where considerable progress has been made. One area is the police: substantial investment from central government has encouraged it to introduce mobility fairly widely and as a consequence they are now reaping significant benefits.
But as far as local authorities are concerned, it’s all been a bit sporadic. One beacon of light has been Project Nomad, which is being very successful in promoting the concept of mobile working in the public sector and showcasing examples of where it is working well. It’s playing a very valuable role.
A good example of local authority adoption is at Winchester City Council, where they’re achieving considerable savings in time and cost through using mobile technology across a number of departments, and are also significantly improving the working lives of their officers.

2. What is holding the local authority sector back from fully embracing mobile working?
I think it’s mainly because of the difficulties in quantifying return on investment. The trend has been to implement mobile working in areas where this is easier to prove. This has mainly comprised task-based services carried out by individuals – care workers, wardens, inspectors – where mobile working clearly streamlines processes and saves time. Therefore they can make more visits, inspections, etc, per day and as a consequence ROI is far easier to demonstrate.

3. What are the major barriers holding back the drive towards mobile working?
It’s mostly around connectivity and the availability of technology, but this is improving. The key challenge we all face is in the area of ubiquitous communications: how can we provide people with connectivity wherever they are, robust enough to support rich applications? And this has particular pertinence for the public sector, as they operate across wide, often rural, areas, where connectivity can be problem.

4. What will influence greater take up?
One of the key influencers will be the green agenda, which will support the drive to mobile working, particularly around the areas of reduced travel and use of paper.
But I believe what will be even more influential is that quality of life is now top of the agenda. There is an ever-growing demand for employers to provide a better working environment for their staff. More and more, we are all demanding more control over our working day. And this is about far more than having a better work/life balance: it’s more about ‘work/life blending’, and mobile working has a key role to play here.
Microsoft has commissioned research in partnership with The Future Laboratory which looks at mobile and networked technologies and the effect they will have on the way we work, play and communicate*. This found that 48 per cent of under-25s felt that being able to determine their own work structures was more appealing than being offered higher salaries. And the opportunity to work away from the office is increasingly seen as a right rather than a privilege. With 40 per cent saying that control over the working day is the main benefit of mobile working, it obvious that providing remote access both from home and while on the move will play a key role in meeting these expectations.
So mobile and flexible working can no longer be seen simply as a way of improving efficiencies. Organisations must realise it’s going to be crucial in ensuring they recruit and retain the best people, and that mobile technology plays a key role in this.

Mobile Work Futures for Microsoft, The Future Laboratory, www.thefuturelaboratory.com
You can read Jason’s blog on blogs.msdn.com/jasonlan