IT directors should establish a competency centre for
mobility to enable their company to develop a mobile
strategy.
Speaking today at
the Gartner ITexpo in Barcelona, Gartner
research vice-president Nick Jones, urged users to look at
expanding the use of mobile e-mail and identify business processes
that would benefit from the immediacy that enterprise mobility
offers.
“Not many organisations have a group responsible for mobility,”
Jones said. He predicted that over the next two to three years
mobility competency centres will be commonplace.
Jones said this group could be used to integrate mobile
technology into the company, define policies and standards and
perform a consulting role.
He suggested IT directors could look at field service type of
applications, which benefit from the immediacy of mobile
connectivity. Such applications could give a business a quick
return on investment of six to 18 month, said Jones.
Other mobile applications of a more collaborative nature, would
also benefit businesses, although the return on investment would be
harder to measure, Jones said.
Jones urged IT directors to standardise on a mobile platform
such as
Windows Mobile 6.0 or
Nokia E
Series, on which to base a mobile strategy.
He also recommended buying devices which support
Wi-Fi, as this could be useful in the
future for voice over IP.
While Research in Motion’s Blackberry e-mail platform has proved
popular with corporate users, Jones questioned whether RIM would be
able to develop new form-factors of devices to cater for the
differing demands of end-users, unlike the Nokia and Microsoft
mobile platforms.
Gartner predicts emergence of B2C mobile
services
Companies will start developing mobile applications for consumer
applications over the next few years, Gartner said.
Among the applications it predicted were airline e-tickets
delivered by SMS, and out-of-hours overdraft approval from banks,
which would authorise a customer to use a cash machine when they
were over their overdraft limit.
Cliff Saran's fear, uncertainty and
doubt blog >>
Computer Weekly's managing technology editor Cliff Saran writes on
the highs and lows of the IT industry, looking at the technology
trends that matter to corporate IT, and those that don't.
Read what he has to say about
Wi-Fi madness.
3GSM show highlights VoIP trend >>.
BlackBerry coming to Windows Mobile >>
Comment on this article: e-mail
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk