Attendees at Computerworld's Mobile & Wireless World conference in Orlando Tuesday heard some tales of surprise wireless benefits that companies didn't expect and that don't show up on the balance sheet.
Not all of them were as dramatic as that told by Aline Ward, CIO of a subsidiary of The Southern Co., a power company in Atlanta. She was relating Southern's experience in rolling out an automated resource management system (ARMS) used for functions such as service order dispatch and vehicle location. Key to the system are radios that field personnel use to stay in contact and feature an emergency button that broadcasts an alert.
Ward said that about five years ago, soon after the rollout started, a field worker was injured in an accident. "He actually fell out of his bucket truck," she said. "He happened to have his radio, and he hit the emergency button." Southern officials learned of the emergency broadcast and called for help. "Someone got there very quickly," Ward said.
She said emergency service officials told Southern that "it was very critical to his full recovery that we got there quickly." And because the company places utmost importance on worker safety, she said, "it sold the system a lot."
Another surprise benefit for Southern was the ability to recover a stolen truck.
"We all laughed about that so much," Ward said. About three years ago in Alabama, a field worker radioed in that his company truck had been stolen. Because ARMS was built to track vehicles, central dispatch knew exactly where the stolen truck was.
"They could see it on the map," Ward said. "They got the police on the phone" and worked with them, providing location updates until the truck was recovered, quickly and with no damage -- the opposite of what usually happens with stolen vehicles.
"It was kind of a neat thing," Ward said.
Robert Gregor Jr., manager of telecommunications at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said the center also received a surprise benefit when it implemented a mobile system designed to give remote workers the same telephone functions enjoyed when they were at their company desks.
The company expected the usual benefits, such as increased efficiency, but was surprised to learn that it also helped in retaining employees, such as tech support workers and transcription staff. He said tech support workers were happier because they could be on standby at home instead of having to remain at a company location.
And there were similar employee retention benefits in the transcription department, he said, especially for mothers "who didn't want to pack up and head out" to an office and could instead stay at home to work.
John Wade, vice president and CIO of Saint Luke's Health System of Kansas City, said that organization's wireless rollout actually ended up being a matter of life and death.
The system wirelessly connects staff, tracks patients and decreases treatment response time, among other things. Wade displayed a graph that indicated the health system's percentage of ischemic stroke patients who received time-sensitive, life-saving treatment was many times the national average.
Wade said it has been determined that for several patients, if the wireless system wasn't in place in areas such as intensive care and cardiology, "that person would be dead."
It wasn't quite so serious for Cox Communications when some its laptops were stolen, but the company was happy to find out that its wireless capabilities could help retrieve them.
Al Briggs, director of mobile solutions services, was at the conference to discuss a wireless system installed primarily to benefit the field service workers at the big Atlanta-based cable provider. After his presentation, he detailed an unexpected benefit that occurred after about 15 laptops were stolen last year in Virginia.
"Some very enterprising technicians in our group" suggested that the company "try something crazy" and use its new wireless technology to "push" software to the laptops to help locate them, Briggs said.
The company happened to have a contract with Absolute Software Corp., which provides Computrace laptop security and tracking software. The software resides in a laptop's BIOS, so it can't be deleted. The company says it provides information such as telephone number, local IP address, routable IP address, MAC address, date and time when a resident laptop connects to the Internet.
Unfortunately, Computrace hadn't been activated in the laptops yet, Briggs said. So the technicians used iAnywhere Inc.'s Afaria mobile device management software to push the Computrace software to the laptops. After that, "we worked with local authorities" and recovered the laptops, Briggs said.
He said the stolen laptop story made it all the way up to the company's CIO, who validated the wireless project's value with a one-word reply: "Cool!"