Mobility Gains Traction - Adoption Varies By Industry and Application

May 22, 2007

By David Barry, News@Cisco

Not long ago, patients being discharged from or admitted to a hospital within the Bronson Healthcare Group might wait for up to an hour while orderlies and greeters rushed around the hospital trying to find a free wheelchair. This was unacceptable for the 4000-employee healthcare system in Kalamazoo, Michigan, that prided itself on the delivery of excellent care.

"Waiting for anything puts stress on a patient," says Nancy Radcliff, a registered nurse and director of customer service at Bronson. "Waiting for something as basic as a wheelchair makes no sense to them, and is therefore extremely frustrating."

Bronson installed a Cisco Wireless Control System and Cisco Wireless Location Appliance that provides fine-grained asset tracking, enabling the organization to quickly track specific locations of its wheelchairs. Orderlies and greeters now find wheelchairs quickly and the hospital has eliminated a once-irritating situation that often defined a patient's last memory of the hospital visit.

It also has saved the hospital $28,000 per month in wasted employee time, according to Bronson.

Changing Face of Mobility

Bronson's experience is indicative of a mobility usage model that Forrester Research calls the "instrumented enterprise" or "extended Internet." According to a Forrester research report, Global Extended Internet Forecast: 2006 to 2012, "the extended Internet connects physical endpoints like sensors and RFID tags to back-end systems to monitor, track, and control a firm's assets."

Forrester estimates that the extended Internet will grow to an $11.6 billion global market by 2012.

Other areas of mobility are also beginning to take hold in enterprises, from mobile email on devices such as Research in Motion's BlackBerrys to personal calendaring. Also gaining in popularity is the use of fixed mobile convergence solutions that extend enterprise corporate directories and instant messaging to mobile phones and provide single number reach and voicemail through products such as Cisco's Unified Mobile Communicator (acquired from Orative).

Maribel Lopez, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, defines the mobile enterprise as "one that can communicate with suppliers, partners, employees, assets, products and customers, irrespective of location."

The challenge today, according to Lopez, is that mobility can be applied broadly and its adoption varies greatly. "Each category of mobility is on a different technological curve," says Lopez. "Laptops are in the later part of the development curve, while mobile sales force applications are just moving beyond the early adopter phase. Wireless LAN adoption is pervasive and growing with almost two-thirds of North American enterprises having deployed in-house WLANs in 2006."

Cisco Perspective: Combining Innovation with Control

Cisco sees mobility as a set of technologies that will impact all companies as they look for improved productivity, better business continuance and more socially conscious green policies.

"Work is no longer a place to go to, but rather a thing to do," says Alan Cohen, Cisco vice president of Mobility Solutions. "Cisco's vision of mobility is to deliver rich business experiences securely at anytime, anywhere and across any network."

In order to facilitate a mobile-ready business, Cisco is working both internally and with external partners to bring to market a comprehensive array of solutions that integrate wired and wireless networks, unified communications, and security. Ultimately, enterprises of all sizes from small businesses to retail leaders with thousands of stores will use these mobility solutions to marry innovation with control.

Dick's Sporting Goods Speeds Service to Customers

Sporting retail giant Dick's Sporting Goods is using the Cisco In-Store Mobile Voice solution to attack one of the major complaints of most retail customers: waiting on hold while somebody (they hope) checks to see if an item is in stock.

"How many times have you called a store looking for an item, only to be placed on hold, and sometimes left on hold for quite awhile," says Tim Dorsch, Manager, Network Infrastructure at Dicks Sporting Goods. "It's not an uncommon customer complaint in the industry. Delivering excellent customer service at any location within the store - not just at the checkout - is a key focus for Dick's Sporting Goods."

With the new Cisco solution, customers that call Dick's today receive inventory information much more quickly and with far less frustration than before. Dick's has equipped store associates in a handful of its stores with Cisco Unified Wireless IP 7920 VoIP Phones. When customers call, rather than reaching an operator or a checkout associate and waiting on hold while the call is transferred around the store, sales associates answer incoming calls directly on their wireless VoIP phones clipped to their belts. Checking the status of an item is fast. Once the customer indicates the type of item they are searching for - a golf club, a basketball, or a walking shoe, for example--the associate begins walking immediately to that area of the store while the customer fills in the details of make, model or size. Distractions along the way are minimized as the customer is in effect "traveling" with the associate. In addition, once the sales associate finds the item, the customer doesn't have to wait while the sales associate traipses back to a central phone station--but rather provides the information immediately.

The Cisco In-Store Mobile Voice solution combines Cisco Unified Communications and the Cisco Unified Wireless Network to deliver mobile voice with the appropriate quality of service (QoS). This enables other applications to also run on the wireless network without impacting the performance or quality of mobile voice. Dick's is now converging its once-isolated inventory and price lookup applications to the Cisco Unified Wireless Network, streamlining management.

"Mobility improves the experience," says Cisco's Cohen. "The experience for customers seeking information or wanting a quick checkout, for telecommuters who want to replicate the office experience at home, or for mobile workers needing to collaborate with others from an airport hotspot or a hotel room. We see mobility as a key business enabler in many industries in the coming years."

David Barry is a freelance journalist located in Princeton, NJ.