April 2011 - Control Global

T H E M O B I L E W O R K E R
Information wants to be
EVERYWHERE
How ya gonna keep ‘em
down at the plant now
that they got an iPad
for Christmas?
By Nancy Bartels
Okay, people, take out your notebooks and write down this
phrase: “The consumerization of workplace tools.” Everyone
from the CEO to the technician is seeing the ease, benefits
and, yes, fun of using mobile tools in their personal lives,
and they’re wondering why, when they can carry around
a phone, a camera and hundreds of tunes, videos, games
and books all in one device in their pockets, they have to
slog through a 3-inch stack of spreadsheets, lug around a
5-pound laptop or be tethered to a desktop computer or a
control room console to get to the data they need at work.
It’s a question that isn’t going to go away. Research group
International Data Corp (IDC) predicts that the global mobile
workforce will increase to over 1 billion workers in 2011,
totaling 30% of the workforce worldwide. In the United
States, numbers are higher still. A total of 70% of the American
workforce will be mobile by 2012. If that sounds like a
lot, remember that the survey defines “mobile worker”as everyone
from the iconic “road warrior” to the contract worker
on another company’s site to mobile field workers.
Chris Stearns, senior product manager at Honeywell Process
Solutions, says, “We’re still in the early adopter phase,
but there’s momentum here, and it’s not going to slow down.”
Mobility Drivers
The fact is, says Paul Brooks, business development manager
for the networking business at Rockwell Automation (www.
rockwellautomation.com), during a phone interview conducted,
by the way, on a VoIP connection between Chicago
and Brussels, “We are all mobile workers—both the CEO and
the technician. You can’t constrain where individual workers
are going to want information and what information they
want to get. And the most important thing is that they want
10 SECURITY QUESTIONS
The technology to secure your mobile network is there, but it is critical
to tailor it to fit your operation’s particular needs. Begin by asking
some basic questions.
1. Why are you enabling mobility plans at your facility? What are
your business goals? The answer to that question will determine
the rest of your plan.
2. How will you define “mobile worker?” Do you mean those working
in remote areas of your facilities, or do you mean those at other
facilities, contract workers, traveling employees or all of these?
3. Who needs mobile access to plant information and what specific
information do they need? Security experts recommend asking
tough questions about who really needs access and what kind
of information and access they need at the start of the project. It is
best to start conservatively with strict limits, and then relax them on
a case-by-case basis over time
4. Is your system configured for secure logons, authorization and
authentication? Do users have to prove they are who they say they
are and that they are entitled to the data they are asking for?
5. Is some of your data best presented in “read-only” format?
6. Have you considered encrypting sensitive data?
7. Are you going to mandate what mobile equipment employees are
to use? Issuing company-mandated phones or computers or allowing
employees to use their personal favorite device each presents
its own set of management, cost and security challenges.
8. How are you going to manage individual devices? How are you
going to roll out upgrades? How are you going to disable a device,
or at least wipe out its data, if it is lost or stolen or if an employee
leaves the company? If employees are using their personal devices,
do you have a way of segregating your company data from a
user’s personal information?
9. Do your needs require access to the Internet? Not every industrial
mobile application does. A robust corporate intranet may be
a much better option.
10. If employees are going to have Internet access, do you have
a clear acceptable-use policy regarding it? Do your employees
know what it is? How are you going to enforce it?
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