This week I have traded my comfortable abode North of Toronto for the warm desert climate of Southern California. After a nice hike through Joshua National Park (today) and a visit to our good friends at Air Rite tomorrow I will be attending the Field Service 2009 conference in Palm Springs. This is a new conference for me (Historically I believe it has been held in Europe) so I am curious to see what it is all about. According to the conference’s website the three day discussions will center on the following broad topics:

• Remote Diagnostics: Utilize connectivity to focus on preventative maintenance and increase first-time resolution.
• Knowledge Management: Link internal and external customers to impact customer satisfaction and product support.
• Technical Assistance Centers: Explore technology integration, technician skill development, capturing support center metrics and utilizing remote agents to save costs.
• Global Service Delivery: Develop your presence in emerging markets, including Global third party partnering
• Field Force Management: Optimize and Integrate Mobile Technologies, Knowledge Management Systems and the Outsourcing of the Field Force

Of the above topics I am most intrigued by the first one. Remote diagnostics seems like a great avenue to help contactors provide a new value added service for their customers. With the knowledge that there is something wrong with a customer’s systems before they know it them themselves a contractor will be able to offer much more proactive service. This is something that I have thought about before but I have not yet been able to figure out how to hook our the Jonas solution into the systems that run at the sites of our client’s customers. I am not getting my hopes up but maybe I will see a solution to this problem this week! Knowledge management also seems like a great topic especially in an environment like the construction industry which is facing a shortage of qualified technicians.

By the end of the week I expect that I will have some great suggestions for how Jonas customers in the service space can optimize their field service operations and a few new ideas on service and mobile solutions to feed back to our development group. I am, of course, also looking forward to seeing the new mobile devices and technologies that will be displayed. Mobile field service has come a long way over the past 3 to 5 years but new developments are still coming fast and furious and I look forward to seeing what is coming down the pipe.

I will be back in Toronto in the early hours of Friday morning. Hopefully I will have something of interest to report in a Friday blog entry... and possibly a nice tan.