Mobile Workforce...thoughts

The productivity gains from giving your employees access to mobile email are difficult to quantify. How much more did we actually accomplish because we were able to review and respond to a slew of emails when making the same number of phone calls would have taken us three times as long? How many problems were we able to resolve quickly just because we had email access? Does anyone actually remember how we got anything done before email? In all of this, the role that email plays in developing relationships and building professional networks is often overlooked. I am not sure if I could get by with out my mobile phone/email device!

Email inarguably changed the face of business, and push email went even further with realizing efficiencies, enhancing communications and driving up productivity. But simply putting the tool—email—in the hands of employees isn’t necessarily enough to achieve the desired results.(Graph: All day usage)
MIT’s Center for Digital Business (CDB), run by executive director David Verrill, found that companies investing the same dollar amounts into information technology don’t always achieve the same productivity gains. The CDB performed a study involving an executive recruiting firm to determine the correlation between email use and productivity in the enterprise.
Researchers looked at 125,000 email messages sent over a period of 10 months. Results were divided into sent email (external and internal) and received email (external and internal).
(Graph: Peak usage in the middle of the day)
Those consultants who were the most highly connected achieved the greatest levels of productivity. These individuals were labeled “information hubs,” according to Verrill, and were highly connected both within and outside the organization. These “information hub” employees yielded the most revenue for the recruiting firm.
(Graph: Uniform usage throughout the day)
"Information hub” employees were associated with having a vaster store of information than others, and having more information is associated with greater productivity, according to the study.
Mobile access to email increases the productivity of those individuals already displaying high value in terms of information distribution. “Mobile information systems have the reported potential to increase the efficiency of mobile employees as a result of improved distribution of information and lower operational cost as well as increase effectiveness, for example in the form of higher quality decision-making,” write Judith Gebauer, Michael J. Shaw and Ramanath Subramanyam, in a study on mobile email (Once Built Well, They May Come: An Empirical Study on Mobile Email).
(Graph: Heavy usage late in the day)
The CDB research also offers insight into email usage patterns. Some consultants (see graph, All day usage) started their days early at 4 a.m. and worked steadily until 6 p.m., where the graph shows a noticeable decline, and then steady activity resumes between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m., with only a few messages sent between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m. Others (see graph, Uniform usage) concentrate their energy into eight hours, toiling steadily from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. So what’s the solution? Pressing a BlackBerry into a worker’s palm isn’t going to help if that person was not actively using email in the first place. To achieve greater productivity, employees should network within their organizations and strive to quickly disseminate critical information as it comes down the pipeline.