Alistair Fuller, IT director at catering company Elior UK, can see the benefits of mobile IT, but also its limitations.

‘The concept of mobility is great, but the hype is more than the practical capability,’ he says.

Elior UK caters for more than 1,000 restaurants across the UK, providing food service expertise for clients in all areas of business, as well as education, healthcare and defence.

The company’s wide geographic spread means that mobile IT is a key business enabler for senior executives, functional heads, operations management, sales management, senior accountants and the IT team.

‘We have 200 mobile management workers who need access to email, diary management, and the ability to keep up-to-date with information while on the move,’ says Fuller. ‘Most have laptops and we have been piloting PDAs with limited success. They work, but they have their limitations.’

Many laptop users have 3G broadband data cards that have proved more workable than PDAs, says Fuller.

‘We use IBM laptops and Vodafone 3G. GPRS is used as back-up to 3G. It is simple enough to use, although relatively expensive, but the laptops extend the reach of email, which is critical to our company as the business is relationship-based,’ he says. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, Fuller says nothing beats a reliable mobile phone.

‘Most critical is telephony, and what people want is a good phone,’ he says. ‘Their benchmark is the old Nokia 6030, which has a battery life of up to a week and users can get good reception. A PDA struggles to live up to that level of phone and battery performance ­ every chance you get you have to plug it in and recharge it.’

Fuller has his own example of a typical handheld gripe. His PDA has a touch-screen interface, and after 15 seconds the screen dims, making saving information in voicemail mode complicated. ‘PDAs don’t have enough horsepower to make them reliably responsive when doing multiple tasks, so often require resetting,’ he says.

Because of such irritations, Fuller says several users have jettisoned their PDAs. A rather cumbersome solution ­ considering a PDA is supposed to conveniently provide several functions in one neat device ­ has been to issue employees with a mobile phone and a handheld device.

‘Only half of our mobile employees equipped with PDAs use them as a combined phone and handheld device,’ says Fuller. ‘The limiting combination of performance and support costs with devices not lasting long before they require a rebuild is prohibitive to extensive take-up.’

Nor are the problems encountered by employees limited to one type of PDA, as several brands have been put to the test. Elior UK’s incumbent mobile operator is Vodafone, but Fuller points out that its email service can work with many devices and provides good support.

‘We have tested Vodafone brands and HP iPAQs over the past year, and they all required rebuilding after a couple of months’ use,’ he says. ‘The level of upgrade compared with a mobile phone or laptop is much more frequent.’

Fuller has found that the PDA’s propensity to malfunction, coupled with variable network coverage, creates diagnostic problems and the risk of non-technical users becoming frustrated.

‘Cell-based networks are variable and you can get symptoms of failure from a PDA by being in the wrong place,’ says Fuller. ‘You get three beeps and nothing happens, giving the impression it has broken down when it is often a connectivity problem. A user without technical knowledge will then press lots of buttons, which exacerbates the problem and can overload the device.’

Fuller is aware that rolling out handhelds extensively across the organisation would place a heavy burden on IT support staff.

‘PDAs are a problem for the support desk. They are used to supporting PCs and laptops, so their personal experience is not extensive,’ he says.

‘Only a sub-set of the support team is competent with PDAs and they get frequent calls. Until we find a uniform stable software build, we will not push out PDAs further.’

As well as internal feedback, Fuller is talking via user groups to other companies about their experiences with mobility.

Gartner analyst Leif-Olof Wallin says connectivity will continue to be an issue for years to come. ‘You cannot talk about ubiquitous connectivity,’ he says. ‘For example, 3G covers 80 per cent of the geography and 95 per cent of the population. In some rural areas you are lucky if you can get a connection, and in cities there is zero connectivity in a basement.

‘There will always be coverage gaps as the commercial drive to increase coverage is not on the menu, so any mobile solution must have offline capability.’ Despite all the hiccups, Fuller says the functions of mobility outweigh the drawbacks.

‘Email on the move and diary function works very well, but that must be balanced against the reliability and performance of devices,’ he says. ‘We will continue trialling until we find a device that is worth rolling out more extensively.’

Alternatives to PDAs are being considered ­ Elior’s French operation is testing BlackBerry devices. And the quest for enterprise-level devices will continue.

Although mobile IT is not as critical to Elior UK as it is for companies in logistics, utilities and manufacturing sectors, Fuller says it has improved access to information, employee efficiency and work-life balance.

‘An employee has a handheld device on all the time and it takes a few seconds to access email and find out if something urgent has happened, so they can switch to their laptop to get the full version and respond if necessary,’ he says.

‘If they have to get the laptop fired up, by the time they’ve switched it on and connected via 3G or wireless, the whole cycle has taken a quarter of an hour just to check email,’ he says.

‘It is hard to quantify business benefits in concrete terms, it is more subtle.

‘Sales people can get important information about clients on the way to customer sites, for example. Ultimately, our senior workforce is very mobile and if mobility helps them manage their time and lives better, we keep our retention rates of senior staff higher.’

Gartner’s Wallin agrees that giving key employees remote access to email can generate big business benefits, cutting response times for decision-making processes.

‘Information flow is more rapid and it has a positive effect on work-life balance as people don’t have to deal with a huge email backlog when they are in the office,’ he says.

Mobility is key to Elior UK’s growth strategy, says Fuller.

‘We are thinking of developing an application for ordering from menus while on the move,’ he says. ‘An employee travelling to an Elior UK site could submit an order internally in advance so they have a meal ready at their named location.’

Another possibility for mobility is multimedia distribution of messages. The firm is unlikely to use mobile TV, but Fuller says it might look at corporate messaging to help motivate staff.

The rollout of WiFi to clients is another project Elior may pursue. ‘WiFi is used in some of our locations and we are looking at extending wireless services to restaurants,’ says Fuller. ‘Many staff restaurants that are for specific clients use their own network, but for some of our public-facing restaurants we are considering WiFi for customers.

Mobile plans at Elior UK remain fluid, but Fuller is exploring what the technology can do for his business with optimism.

‘There is enough proof of concept of mobility for it to have a fantastic future,’ he says.

Mobile policy at Elior UK

Catering company Elior UK does not have a policy specifically designed for PDA use – but IT director Alistair Fuller does insist that mobile workers are familiar with email etiquette.

‘Email is used as a means of distributing information, but we do give training to ensure its effective use within the business,’ he says. ‘Mobile management workers are big users of email, but we tell them not to fire off mails and expect them to be actioned. The recipient might not be there and it shows a lack of consideration. If something needs to be urgently communicated, employees should use the phone.’

Another hazard is lack of targeting. ‘We encourage employees to send the email to the person who is expected to action the message and not send it unnecessarily to half-a-dozen people,’ says Fuller. ‘If other people are copied in, we tell them they are not expected to act on the message.’

Fuller says the most effective use of mobile email is for team-based communication to escalate issues that are not urgent, often a good use of time spent in transit between sites.

More broadly, he says exploration into new technology requires risks, and believes that technology leaders should attempt to learn how to manage the new issues that arise.

Strategy Analytics analyst Andy Brown agrees that mobility projects are often introduced as point solutions with little consideration for broader integration.

‘Mobility is often limited to specific groups, such as department heads, with policy administration driven by a reactive rather than proactive approach,’ he says.

Brown says that IT departments are beginning to look at mobile policy in more detail, particularly with regard to issues such as controlling voice and data costs.

‘Control is shifting more to IT and away from department heads who were traditionally responsible for mobile voice,’ he says.