1. ”Mobile Process Support Systems - Experiences from a case study “
Three years old, but findings still important enough to report.
Presentation at MOBIS 2004, by Børge Haugset

2. Research area Norway’s largest telecom company - Telenor
Introduction of a new work-process support system for phone engineers:
How does it impact the work process?
Does this change the way they relate to each other?
Phone engineers – What are they doing?
The case study was done in a large Norwegian telecom company, during a two year period
ending in 2001.
Telenor introduced a new work-process support system, in which the phone engineers
played a vital role.
What is a phone engineer, what is his/her role?
(It has to be mentioned, they were at times pretty hard to come by, not too much time
to drag a researcher along :-)
At least I managed to call a lot of them, and followed a handful of them around while they
were working. But they usually do other things than being observed.

3. Phone engineers working out(doors)
I use the term phone engineer as a common term for people installing and maintaining
the telecommunications networks all the way to the end-user. Installing ISDN
Their job follows the same pattern regardless of the support system:
- A problem or a new installation is reported to a central: A customer
complains that their phone isn’t working anymore.
- They need information about where to go, and what kind of job to expect.
- The basis of each task is a work order which should contain all the information
needed to finish the job.
- They finish the job, and report it in some way. And head for the next one.
- The engineers I followed finished 6-8 small tasks per day, or 2-3 large.
Phone engineers often cover a large geographical area, and much of their work
is done outdoors
- Many tools, rain, moving a lot
- This also means that their support systems needs to take this in regard

4. Three versions of work support
Paper
DART
Advantex
SKULLE HATT PAPIRBILDE
Paper: “I head down to the central in the morning, and pick up the working orders”
- Reporting when finished done via mobile phone
- Free to sort the jobs according to taste.
DART:
- H/PC (PDA) for each worker
- Download the set of working orders from the net each morning, using the
mobile phone
- Reporting after each job, via the H/PC
Advantex:
- Laptops in the cars, with GPRS modems
- Taxi dispatch system
- More interactive use
- Resource centre always knows where they are (30 engineers)

5. Insights and learnings
What works best, PDA or laptop?
to my surprise: rather laptop than PDA. Why?
Paper versus electronic devices
durability in many contexts
micromobility (Luff & Heath, 1998)
Phone engineers indeed sit down (or want to)
nomadic workers are also stationary
communities of practice (Wenger, 1998)
As a researcher you tend to at least have some personal opinions, wondering if you see some trends etc…
I thought that the introduction of DART, the H/PC system, would prove beneficial to the engineers.
They had access to updated information, while at the customers.
This was, however, not the case. The actual workflow using DART was quite different from the intended. (Some people liked it)
Reasons for this include screen size, tiny keyboard, slow speed, unstable connection (reporting ONE job could take at least
five to ten minutes).
Viewing an HTML page that is actually several A4 pages long on a H/PC is at best tedious.
One person said: “You sit there drumming your fingers, and KNOW you have a lot of work to do”
The usefulness of the DART system was, by most users, never seen.
Result: People did it at home, from their stationary computers (printed out). Reporting was done either from home after work, or by calling.
When hearing that they were going to install a system based on laptops in their cars, I was wondering what they had been smoking.
How do you support a group of workers that run back and forth between different customers by introducing laptops sitting in their cars?
Actually:
Advantex solved a lot of the problems the engineers had with DART. The most important issue was speed and stability.
- Larger screens gave room for a better view of the job.
- The constant connection
More responsibilities.
Better for the central, not delving into this
PAPER VS COMPUTER:
When introducing new technologies into a working system, the advantages of the new part must be larger than the old one.
This was not the case with DART. It couldn’t’ stand the conditions the engineers worked under.
I saw one engineer copying notes from his Advantex system to paper before heading to the customer.
He liked it better than the DART system.
Paper supports micromobility (Luff & Heath), putting it in your back pocket, jotting down notes on it…
(instead of taking notes on the old paper order, you ended up with taking notes on old chewing gum paper and the like)
Taking notes on the PDA was not as successful
Nomadic workers:
At one of the sites I studied, people used to meet in the morning, drinking coffee and discuss today’s
work and yesterdays football results.
With the introduction of these new systems, such meetings were explicitly forbidden: Drive straight to first job
What happened? – They met half an hour BEFORE work started
“You talk about your profession; you get something to be proud of”
Upholding the community of practice [Wenger]
The introduced an intranet solution, but the people I asked felt that this was more tedious: “Today I’ll sit down
and tell others about my experiences”
Explicit channels replacing implicit communication.

6. Conclusion Smaller and more portable is not always better
Computerised is not necessarily better than paperbased
Nomads != lone rangers
(Don’t support only the nomadic part of their work)
END
Smaller and more portable…: Work process support systems must be introduced