Wireless Enterprise Applications
Q: Let's talk about the application areas and what people are doing.
Christfort: People often think about just mobile-enabling their existing applications, so you can access them from a mobile device. A lot of companies sell tools and middleware that lets you do that. You have things like AvantGo, which scrapes pages and caches them for access by Palm devices. But that sort of defeats its own purpose, because when you look at enterprise applications, mobility is not just about accessing existing screens and applications from a new device; it's actually about new business processes.
My favorite example is the inventory application, which typically has been operated by the office clerk. The warehouse guy with a mobile device is a completely different user from the clerk. So extending the clerk's application to a mobile device and giving it to the warehouse guy is not going to work. You have to think about enabling a new part of a business process that was manual before. You need to look at the warehouse guy's clipboard, not the clerk's desktop.
Q: In addition to inventory and warehousing, what other areas are promising for mobile applications?
Christfort: I would argue that there are virtually no businesses or industries that don't have mobile business processes. Even with ERP and strictly back-end systems, you're going to find activities that are application areas for mobile. With accounting, it is expense reporting, because nobody wants to do expense reports after the fact.
Field service is an application that's almost 100-percent mobile. Applications like that are so blatantly mobile that eventually they won't even have back-end parts. But the back-end systems will also have mobile components. So in my view, it's not helpful to ask which applications have mobile aspects, because the answer is: every single application. Let's try to do the reverse and ask what applications should not be mobile. Can you think of any?
Q: Maybe not, but is there a distinction between applications that require occasional connectivity vs. constant connectivity? If you're going to do expense reports, you're probably not going to do them three times a day. You might do them when you get back to your hotel.
Christfort: You can argue that you could organize your work to do it in bulk using a desktop. It's a little like batch processing vs. real-time manufacturing. Batch processing is OK if you don't have advanced technology. But any manufacturing guru will tell you that the optimal speed and quality of production occurs when you are able to synchronize your process such that everything occurs in real time. That's because you're operating on the most accurate information, you don't do redundant actions, and you don't carry a lot of inventory.
Q: So when you leave a restaurant, you could put in the check amount and not have to enter it again on a separate expense report.
Christfort: Actually, the restaurant would present the bill through Bluetooth. You would accept it and pay with your credit card, and it would already be in general ledger through an authentication point.
Q: That would be cool, but is it compelling for corporations? In the current climate, people are looking for hard return on investment.
Christfort: We have to remember that the business benefits are sweeping and compelling, and businesses are trying to understand that. The efficiency improvements from back-end automation are starting to taper off, so people are increasingly looking at this untapped opportunity to improve employees' productivity when they are away from their desks. I saw a study that showed that 40 percent of employee hours in the average business is not spent at a desk. That means if you want to make your enterprise more responsive and make better decisions faster at low cost, which is what it all whittles down to, then mobile is increasingly seen as the only technology that can get you further ahead of your competition.
A few years ago, e-mail was not pervasive in many industries. Large companies that ran e-mail had an advantage over competitors who didn't. But today, every business runs on e-mail, and there's a parity of competitiveness around decision-making. You have to jump to the next thing to stay ahead. Companies that went to e-mail first might be the same companies that use mobile access first.
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Business Models and Standards 
