Managing a mobile workforce is nothing new for Bill Catopodis, senior manager of business technology for Pfizer Australia, the local arm of the world's biggest pharmaceutical company.

Like many companies, Pfizer Australia has allowed its employees to use laptops, supplied mostly through an arrangement with IBM, for several years, and management has worked hard to streamline processes so that field workers can operate in harmony with the company's sales force automation systems. So last year when Pfizer Australia's employees asked for more flexibility, Catopodis didn't hesitate to expand on the broadband/VPN connectivity currently available to Pfizer Australia's workers and, with the help of the technology team, spent four months investigating the telco vendors' wireless broadband offerings before eventually opting to go with Telstra.

"Most recently, one of the big things that our organization has asked us to help them solve is the constant challenge of trying to deal with work/life balance," Catopodis says. "We needed to provide representatives with opportunities to deal with administrative-type tasks during the day - without them having to work a full day and then go home and deal with e-mail after hours."

Pfizer Australia's technology groups support about 2100 internal clients, of which about 1800 have personal computers (the remaining 300 or so work in Pfizer's local manufacturing operations), and of those 1800, about 500 are field representatives, salespeople who are spread across three divisions.

"Those 500 people definitely work all over the place, from home and in the field," Catopodis says. "The two biggest field forces, pharmaceutical and consumer healthcare, have laptops with wireless broadband. And there is middle and upper management, with 150 to 200 people, who obviously spend long hours working from home as well ."