The Business
Continuity Institute - Aug 13, 2014 10:14 BST
Recently I did a remarkably silly thing. Something I hadn’t
done in almost seventeen years as the proverbial travelling consultant.
I went to London. No, that’s not the silly thing – I go to
London quite often and honestly it’s really not that bad there. Even for a
country bumpkin like me. No, the silly thing came to light after I’d
boarded the train and it was pulling out of the station. I opened my bag to
take out my laptop and some papers so that I could start work and my laptop
wasn’t there. I checked again. And again. But it still wasn’t there.
After
checking for a fourth time the penny finally dropped – I’d left my laptop
at home. I was a couple of minutes into a two-hour train journey, all ready
to get stuck in to some quality report writing time and my laptop, one of
the main tools of my trade – if not the main tool – was sitting at home,
rather than on the table in front of me.
Andy Osborne is the Consultancy Director at Acumen, and author of Practical Business Continuity Management. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog or link up with him on Linked In.
After the initial panic attack subsided I remembered that I
wasn’t presenting today, so at least I didn’t need my laptop for any of my
meetings. And I had my phone, and lots of people tell me that’s all they
need to be able to work. “I can just work from wherever I am, as long as I
have my mobile phone and an internet connection” is an assertion I hear all
the time. Well this was a perfect opportunity for me to put that theory to
the test.
Luckily I had a charger with me, otherwise I’d have been in
trouble from the off. Because the second thing I didn’t do last night – the
first being to not spot the absence of a laptop when I checked the contents
of my bag (yes I did actually check, or at least I thought I did – it was
late) – was to charge my ‘phone. I have one of those ‘phones that you have
to charge about every three and a half hours (you know the ones) so the 20%
remaining battery life probably wouldn’t have got me halfway to London, let
alone seen me through the day.
Blind faith in 'the cloud'
So I plugged in and off I went. I couldn’t work on the
report that I’d planned to because, whilst I synchronise files between my
desktop and laptop, I don’t store all of my data in the cloud as a matter
of course. In fact I don’t store much there at all, particularly if it’s
confidential. Call me old fashioned but I haven’t yet developed the same
blind faith in 'the cloud' that many others have. I’m with one of my
information security colleagues on this one – he recently said “I wish
people would stop calling it ‘the cloud’ and start calling it ‘putting my
data on someone else’s computers’”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying 'the
cloud' is all bad. And yes, I do use it. But I’m extremely selective about
what I choose to put there. There are, after all, some significant
advantages if it’s used properly. But the cloud is a big and often
dimly-lit place and not every cloud is created equal. Call me a cynic but I
largely think of 'the cloud', particularly the free bits of it, as a really
convenient way of letting someone else delete, corrupt, leak, sell, give
away, deny me access to or otherwise compromise my data so that I don’t
have to do it myself. Which I personally think is a healthy attitude that
others would do well to adopt.
But I digress. In any case, trying to write a proper report
on a phone, as opposed to making a few notes, isn’t the easiest thing in
the world to do. For a start, typing large amounts of text on a phone isn’t
as easy as on a real keyboard, at least for anyone with normal sized
fingers. Let alone the fact that my phone is constantly correcting what I
type, which means I spend an inordinate amount of time correcting it back
again. Then there’s the compatibility issues (which I won’t go into here as
it’ll probably just turn into a rant against Microsoft and Apple),
which means that you’re pretty much restricted to text only, without too
much formatting and certainly nothing as weird and wonderful as a table.
But I digress again. At least I could start by sending a few
e-mails. Except there was no network connection. On-board wifi hasn’t made
much of an appearance on the trains from Evesham to London yet, at least not
the peak time trains (for some reason you can get it at 2 o’clock in the
afternoon, which is really useful for the majority of business travellers
who actually have to get up in the morning). And the mobile phone signal is
somewhat patchy for the first part of the journey. Funny how I can get a
mobile signal at the top of a ski slope but not in the Cotswolds, despite
the claims of 99% UK coverage by the mobile ‘phone companies (second rant
suppressed).
So I read a couple of (paper) documents, wrote a bit of my
blog, corrected the corrections, finally managed to send and receive some
e-mails, did a bit of web browsing (albeit looking at stuff on a very small
screen), popped a couple of headache tablets and arrived in London for my
meetings.
Shortly before I got on the train home, my phone started
bleating “low battery” at me again. “No matter”, I thought, “I’ll just
charge it on the train”. Except the electrical sockets on this particular
train weren’t working. So I had about twenty minutes of trying to access my
e-mails (and failing, due to a glitch at my internet service provider –
good old Sod’s Law!) and writing a few notes for later processing before my
phone gave up the ghost. At which point I gave up too and read the paper
instead.
Pre-smartphone days
So, how effective was my plan to “just work from wherever I
am using my mobile ‘phone”. Well, I suppose I managed to do a bit, and
significantly more than in the pre-smartphone days. But how effective was
it really? Well I think the answer to that is fairly evident. I reckon I
probably achieved fifteen to twenty percent of what I’d have been able to
do had I had my laptop to hand.
Yes, remote working is eminently possible – I do it all the
time – but its effectiveness is hugely dependent on the tools available and
the type of work that you’re trying to do remotely. Even working at home
can be problematical and far less efficient than working in an office, if
that’s what you normally do. And if you’re a laptop user and you don’t have
it with you (which is a distinct possibility if you’re one of the many,
many people who leave their laptops in the office when they go home) remote
working can be trickier still.
And yes, there are all sorts of things that can be done with
a smartphone (aside from checking Facebook or tweeting), particularly if
your job largely involves phoning and emailing people and making a few
notes. But in my experience their usefulness is limited and they’re really
no substitute for a proper computer if you have things like reports to
write (or read) or large, complicated spreadsheets to deal with, amongst
other things. And, whilst they may be OK for a short period, I challenge
anyone to work effectively for anything more than a very short time using
just their smartphone.
So next time someone says to you “I can just work from
wherever I am, as long as I have my mobile phone and an internet
connection,” I strongly suggest you challenge them to prove it. Because
some things are a lot easier said than done.
Andy Osborne is the Consultancy Director at Acumen, and
author of Practical Business Continuity Management. You can follow him on Twitter and his blog or link up with him on Linked In.
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