KEY POINTS:
When staff at property management company Full House carry out quarterly flat inspections for clients these days, they leave the clipboard and paper checklist back at the office.
Instead of ticking boxes, they peruse the property with their mobile phone in hand, entering comments on the state of
each room using a custom-designed drop-down menu that appears on the screen.
When they hit "send" as they leave the address, a pdf document recording all their observations is emailed directly to the client, giving an instant, easy-to-read report on the state of the real estate investment.
The Wellington property agency is using a technology called Application Message Service (AMS) developed by Wellington company Kinross Group.
Kinross director Ruth Bruce says companies with field staff who spend much of their time filling in forms while out of the office can cut administration costs significantly using AMS.
"If people don't have to wait for paper to come back to the office, and for somebody to enter it, and somebody else to check it, the amount of cost you can strip out of your admin is substantial," she says.
While increasing numbers of workers are sending and receiving emails on their mobiles, businesses are also starting to latch on to the potential of using employees' phones to enhance productivity and save costs in other ways.
Driven by the popularity of devices such as the iPhone and BlackBerry, software companies are developing an increasing range of phone-based applications aimed at turning the mobile into a go-anywhere extension to the office computer systems.
Over the past two months, global business software giants Oracle and SAP have both released new Apple iPhone applications designed to allow remote access to their programs.
Closer to home, online accounting software start-up Xero, headed by Apple technology enthusiast Rod Drury, has also launched an interface giving its customers the ability to check and update their accounts using the iPhone.
Xero launched its iPhone application in May, cleverly anticipating the heightened interest that would be created by Apple's release last month of the much-hyped 3G version of its iconic mobile device.
Meanwhile, one of New Zealand's largest business software companies, Greentree, plans to launch a mobile platform in October which will give customers phone-based access to a wide range of its applications.
Greentree chief executive Peter Dickinson says that as well as the productivity advantages of enabling field staff to feed information into the system throughout their working day - rather than having a backlog of data entry to do at the end of it, there is also growing business interest in "remote management" functionality. This is the ability for managers to use their mobile to receive real-time reports summarising important business metrics, or to receive an alert on the device if the office system records an unusual event - such as sales staff lodging a particularly large order at a discount price.
SAP spokesman Peter Sertori says the increased demand for mobile applications is also being driven by the arrival of Generation Y into the workforce. This is a demographic that is the first to grow up with cellphones, meaning they have an "information now" approach.
"It's a function of the changing nature of the workforce. People have different expectations now of the applications they interface with at work," Sertori says.
Recent reductions in the price Telecom and Vodafone charge to move data over their mobile networks has helped to encourage corporate enthusiasm for making more use of mobile devices.
The increasingly sophisticated functionality available on the handsets that run on those networks, with increased data network speeds, has also helped to drive interest. Kinross' Application Message Service, for example, works on a range of Nokia and BlackBerry devices connected to the Vodafone network.
However, not all workers appreciate the trend towards making more office activities accessible on the cellphone or PDA.
The ever-increasing use of mobile devices to access email, driven particularly by the popularity of the BlackBerry, has resulted in the device being labelled the "CrackBerry" because of the compulsive and addictive email-checking behaviour exhibited by many of the device's users.
Concerns about "CrackBerry-itis" have prompted some businesses to introduce policies prohibiting staff from using BlackBerries after hours, but this has only fuelled the anxieties of hardened users.
The arrival of other office tools on the mobile screen is only likely to intensify the stresses of those workers who don't embrace the increasingly "always-on" nature of some jobs.
Greentree's Dickinson says one of the headaches associated with using mobiles to access office systems has been that mobile applications have tended to be developed separately from the core business software, meaning there can be connectivity issues when the core systems are upgraded.
Greentree's strategy with its soon-to-be-launched mobile platform, he says, is to make it fully integrated with the company's core software, so that upgrades will automatically encompass the mobile-based software.
"People picture the mobile world as a different layer. I think in five years' time people will see it as just another device for getting into your systems whereas at the moment it's seen as a totally different architecture and piece of technology that sits on the side," he says.
"We've gone pretty radical with this and built Greentree into the one architecture right through on to the mobile device. So when you're updating your core systems, and people in the office are connecting and getting a new software version automatically updating on system, the same thing will be happening on the mobile."
So the bad news for the anti-CrackBerry crowd is that an army of software developers are working tirelessly to ensure more and more work activity is only as far away as your mobile.
The one piece of good news for frazzled workers seeking some out-of-office solitude: no handset manufacturer has yet produced a mobile device without an off button.
Simon Hendery is a freelance business writer and writes the Business Herald's Connect column
