Why your company needs to go mobile now
Without mobile business strategies, your company might be at a competitive disadvantage. Mobile applications and devices can speed up decision-making and improve customer service—while saving your company money.
By Howard Baldwin
If you haven’t deployed your mobile business strategies, perhaps it's time to reconsider the power of those small portable screens. There's no doubt that the market is thriving. According to research firm Gartner Dataquest's most recent numbers, for the third quarter of 2006, worldwide shipments of smartphones grew by 41.7 percent compared with the same quarter in 2005, while worldwide PDA shipments grew by 28.6 percent over the same period. Gartner Dataquest also estimates that by the end of 2008, even employees who spend just 20 percent of their time away from their primary work location will have wireless access to e-mail.
Another good reason to develop mobile business strategies is because research shows mobile tools are increasingly becoming a key component of business success. According to research firm IDC, the worldwide mobile enterprise application market had revenues of US$1.24 billion in 2005 with predicted growth to US$3.5 billion in 2010, representing a compound annual growth rate of 23.1 percent.
Bob Egan, research director for emerging technologies at the Needham, Massachusetts-based research firm TowerGroup, predicts, "As mobile technology continues to mature at the level of the network, the applications, the operating system, and the devices, it is absolutely going to be the next growth hormone for business productivity."
Fortuitously, deploying mobile business strategies has improved significantly during the past few years. Egan explains, "You have mobile devices with 400-megahertz processors and onboard memory in excess of 1 gigabyte. Speeds are up, transmission latencies are down. The segment has almost reinvented itself."
Companies are discovering that mobile technology can deliver a distinct competitive advantage in two ways. First, when employees can communicate wherever they are, they can make decisions more quickly, which—in manufacturing especially—decreases time to market for new products. This, ideally, helps companies start making money from their development efforts faster.
Second, companies—primarily airlines with schedule updates and financial services firms with stock information—are using mobile technology to serve customers more efficiently by deploying information and applications directly to customers' mobile devices.
Mobility in action
| • | Both electronics manufacturer Nikon and automaker Nissan have deployed mobile technologies to improve collaboration. Nikon executives are using handheld devices running Windows Mobile 5.0 that access Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. Access to critical information allows them to make decisions quickly and improve time to market. Nissan estimates that the ability to collaborate more easily on a global basis will save at least US$135 million over the next few years and help bring vehicles to market faster. |
| • | Egan's favorite example: an insurance company (which he can't name) whose claims adjusters have digital cameras, computers, and printers in their vehicles. They record damage visually and in electronic form, upload the information to the corporate database, get a settlement amount, transmit the information via Bluetooth to a portable printer, and hand the customer a check before they leave. |
As the accompanying articles on developing a business case for mobility and mobile IT issues show, companies still need to be rigorous regarding deployment and support of mobile devices. But mounting evidence reveals that they can deliver a clear competitive advantage.
Silicon Valley-based freelance writer Howard Baldwin was disappointed that he didn't get a Treo 700w running Windows Mobile 5.0 last Christmas.
