October 2003 Mfg.Trust

Mfg.Trust is a monthly feature of the
            NCMS InfraGard Manufacturing Industry Association
                        Infrastructure assurance for manufacturers
                                    Powered by NCMS.

This month – OCCASIONALLY CONNECTED COMPUTING
New Challenges for a New Era of Mobile Computing

See the Resources Page for this Story 

Editor's Preface:

Mobile/wireless PCs are creating new expectations among industry, business and defense users. They want to maintain their work sessions without disruption as they move in an out of wireless hotspots. However, service discontinuities mean that mobile/wireless PC users have to operate in an intermittently connected world. Intermittent connection is a frustrating experience, but recent innovations are making occasionally connected computing possible and practical. This article examines the implications and opportunities brought about by this new capability.

New threats accompany the new opportunities in an intermittently connected environment. Anyone who would create such an environment should have their wireless security well organized. Relevant links to NCMS online training are featured at the end of this article.

Further, NCMS is leading a collaboration to examine Occasionally Connected Computing in a defense maintenance context. For more information about this effort, please contact Tony Haynes (734-995-4930, tonyh@ncms.org)

Editor

OCCASIONALLY CONNECTED ELECTRICITY

Four trends have converged to create the expectation that occasionally connected computing should be practical:

#1 – Motivated by productivity improvement, business users are making notebook PCs, very capable PDAs, and even Web phones their client systems of choice.

#2 – For similar reasons, businesses are piloting and deploying wireless local area networks.

#3 – No longer tethered to their desks, more and more business people expect to be productive while they are on the go, even if it is simply going from an office to a conference room.

#4 – Just recently, tablet notebook PCs offer hardware and software capabilities that give users a way to interact with natural language, mainly handwriting. Tablet PCs nicely fill the gap between notebook PCs that are too cumbersome and PDAs that are too limited.

This last trend becomes particularly important in an industrial or defense setting. A tablet PC can support and display detailed equipment drawings, search spare parts databases, retain repair manuals, and still enable users to fill out forms by hand. Using different documents, databases, and images, this scenario also works in a healthcare environment.

Getting Occasionally Connected

Change will happen as products designed from the ground up for wireless mobility become widely available. The central capability needed is asynchronous messaging (e.g. application synchronization or publish/subscribe). This approach provides graceful reconnections. The Resources page offers a number of technical articles for those interested. For our purposes here, it is adequate to mention that software developers are hard at work bringing these capabilities to us.

In addition to asynchronous messaging, it is useful to have tools that adapt to connection status and device capabilities. Web services tools from a number of vendors can help build that capability into occasionally connected computing applications.

Understanding the Limitations

Security is and will remain a significant challenge as standards evolve. Security concerns will prevent some applications from ever being on a wireless network. Organizations must address security on the connection/network, but also by securing data on the device where proprietary and/or sensitive data is stored and needs to be protected from loss or theft.

Legacy applications will remain a big challenge. These new technologies do not always work with old applications. Stated another way, the organization should plan for obsolescence of many older products, and plan to acquire products that can support these new trends. As shown below, this may be an opportunity to ditch an antiquated system.

Occasionally connected computing stresses networks in new ways. Quality of service (QOS), not the speed of the network, may be the most important criterion in whether successful wireless deployments can be made. Further, it will be many years before workers can expect ubiquitous connectivity in a public environment.

Opportunities for Early Adoption

Although wireless email is certainly popular, it may not be an application with a high business value for wireless conversion or expansion. The most compelling business case for occasionally connected computing may lie in industrial field-employee automation, particularly in those industries where field representatives are plentiful, such as warehousing, maintenance and repair, delivery and logistics, or utilities. There might also be an opportunity to leapfrog from antiquated DOS or green screen applications directly to a mobile environment.

Conclusion

According to analysts, this wave of change is coming, but not immediately because of national and international economic constraints. Jack Gold, of the META Group, reports in his Wireless Imperative (see Resources) ...”CIOs should begin to craft a cohesive strategy for using wireless technologies to extend application functionality to mobile employees and customers over the next three to five years.”

Of course, only some situations are appropriate for occasionally connected computing. A persistent, real time connection is appropriate for a missile fire control solution, or life support systems. However, used appropriately, good mobile computing tools can extend our productivity and bring good business value.


Please take a moment to review the Resources Page. You will find more detail there.

LINKS

http://trust.ncms.org select ‘Publications Index’ tab to find:
Securing Digital Documents – August 2003 Mfg.Trust
Where to Begin, Integrating Security - June 2002 Mfg.Trust
Wireless Local Area Networks - May 2002 Mfg.Trust


NCMS Online Courses at http://training.ncms.org/index_shock.htm
Online Class: Mobile Device Security
Online Class: Wireless LAN Security
Online Class Series: Managing Information Technology for Competitive Advantage

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If you liked Mfg.Trust, please forward it to a colleague in your company!

For questions, comments, or for NCMS Alliance Partners to request their own FREE subscription to Mfg.Trust, send e-mail to johns@ncms.org