The integration of mobile workplaces is a major challenge for companies
from a technical as well as a business process perspective. Market
pressure, increasing competition and an increased demand on information
readiness, generate the necessity to include mobile workforce into
company IT and business processes. This can be reached by equipping
mobile workforce with mobile devices to make them independent from
desktop information systems. Within this book interdisciplinary
approaches from Human Computer Interaction and Business Process
Management are combined to foster tool acceptance among mobile
workforce. Furthermore, we investigated technical, process and
individual aspects of mobile tool integration into existing,
reengineered business processes. For the projected improvement of Key
Performance Indicators (KPI) empirical evidence was gathered within five
industry case studies, and recommendations for action when introducing
mobile tools into an existing process, were elaborated. Moreover, a
prototypic mobile help desk tool was implemented and usability tested to
investigate contributions of Usability Engineering to KPI improvement.
Major results are (a) same typical business process metrics are affected
after mobile tool deployment in different IT-Service companies, (b)
major process improvements arise not from faster job processing but from
faster and more accurate data access and transmission and (c) user
participation in software development as well as business process
reengineering fosters tool acceptance and reduces the payback period.
