Mobile Innovation. I'm about to go to bed, but noticed that the latest version of Wireless Business & Technology Magazine has been published, and amazingly all the contents are available online. There are some decently detailed stories in there, including this article about adoption of mobile technologies in corporations. It cleanly breaks down the process into 3 areas, though these can be assigned to *any* new technology, I was struck by its simplicity and focus:
1. Mobile access: Mobile data is deployed to provide an additional or unique connectivity layer. An example: when mobile data provides a further connectivity option for access to e-mail or to sales force data. According to our research, this was the most commonly adopted approach to deployment.
2. Mobile reinvention: With this approach, deploying mobile data triggers a review and, typically, a redesign of business processes. For example, Sun Microsystems undertook a major review of its field force's times and material process simultaneous to deploying mobile data. The technology sparked significant process improvement and generated massive performance gains, for example, in the area of billing accuracy and promptness. This, in turn, led to improved cash flow. Gains from this approach far exceed those typically achieved from mobile access.
3. Mobile innovation: In this scenario, mobile data enables applications that simply couldn't exist without the technology. An example: using positioning information from vehicles to feed traffic information services. The quality of a traffic-information service depends on the quantity and quality of data sources.
The rest of the issue looks amazingly chock full of good stuff about new mobile services, 3G, CDMA, handsets, WiFi and more. (It even mentions perenial “next big thing” company IXI and their PMG technology!). And the whole mag is available as a big-ass 12MB PDF if you want to digest it all in one go.
I know I'm not going to be able to really grok this right now, so I'm going to bed. But this stuff is definitely on the must read list for tomorrow. [Russell Beattie Notebook]