Managing the Mobile Enterprise whitepaper

Motorola in conjunction with Palm have released a whitepaper titled "Managing the Mobile Enterprise – A guide for creating effective enterprise Wireless Strategies". Whilst this is a bit short in page length for a whitepaper (only 12 pages) it does give some basic guidelines that are necessary for IT management to write recommendations for building an efficient mobile workforce and managing it cost effectively.

 

An interesting statistic from Gartner in the Whitepaper claims that only 8% of the 30.3 million mobile professionals in the world today are e-mail enabled. Supposedly this will grow to 21% in this year. I find this percentage to be ridiculously low, but how Gartner measured this is unknown. The fact remains that mobile workers are in the Enterprise today and their numbers will only grow moving forward. IT infrastructures must be designed to accommodate and manage these new additions now versus later.

 

Whilst the whitepaper does go further to describe the other uses of mobile other than email and its related services, it is crucial that IT managers who are planning these systems understand the implementation of technologies such as 3G now herald in a two way communication regime with mobiles that make them information receptors just as much as information retrievers.

 

Therefore management must incorporate both the back-end services as well as the mobile device platform in their planning and infrastructure development.

 

Of the many projects I’ve worked on with mobile work force & sales force roll outs, the most successful have been those that have had a strong communication with the end users, including incorporating their feedback early in the development cycle. As the case with PC desktop deployments, without end user buy-in to the mobile systems being deployed, they will not be utilised to their full potential.

 

 

Technorati Tags – 3g – convergence – mobile – mobile enterprise