Corporate Mobility Becomes Mainstream and Outlines the Shape of the Future with Mobile Business 2.0. Part 2

Gartner: The most significant trends shaping the Wireless and Mobile industry. The most significant trends in the wireless and mobile industry that will affect people during the next five years.

2. Mobile email Gartner predicts that wireless email users worldwide will reach 20 million in 2006 and 100 million in 2009. Mobile email has primarily been a niche application for executives, largely based on BlackBerry. However, it is on the cusp of becoming main stream also for middle management and it will eventually pervade the enterprise as email did a decade ago. Today, high quality wireless email services are still expensive and this limits widespread deployment. However, Gartner predicts that by 2010, wireless email will be a commodity and organisations will no longer need to cost-justify investments. Gartner also predicts that by 2008, Microsoft will achieve feature parity with Research in Motion (RIM) and become the dominant email provider. 3. Mobile collaboration Mobile workforce and collaborative technologies both feature in the top four priorities for chief information officers (CIOs) in 2006. Mobile collaboration is emerging in response to a need for increased IT support for 'soft' collaborative tasks combined with greater staff mobility. Until now, the IT organisation has primarily proven its value to the business by driving down cost through automation. Today, many companies have already completed the easy business process automation tasks such as customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, and they are at a point of diminishing returns. Moving forward, the opportunities to increase further returns lie in augmenting the effectiveness of individual knowledge workers. Mpeople are no longer fixed in one place and this means they need more support for mobile collaborative work. Geographically distributed knowledge workers will be both highly valuable to the organisation, and sophisticated enough to be aware of a wide range of consumer mobile technologies. Mobile technology and market trends will facilitate collaborative applications. We will see increasingly powerful smartphones that can use Bluetooth, cellular and WiFi enter the market. In addition, consumers and employees are becoming more familiar with web based collaboration tools such as blogs and Wikis, which will speed up the acceptance of the mobile equivalents when they come to market. 4. Corporate Mobility We are witnessing the 'growing up' of mobility, as it becomes increasingly controlled and managed as part of corporate architecture and strategy. Gartner's 2005 survey of European mobile professionals showed that enterprise priorities are evolving from individual projects such as email or sales force automation, to mainstream strategy. As mobility becomes mainstream, enterprises are seeing the need to formalise this by developing mobile policies and strategies. They are making strategic decisions, such as which vendor will be their strategic mobile partner, for the first time. Although large-scale mobility is still relatively rare, pilot projects will often lead to larger implementations and the familiarity with mobile technology created by these projects will reduce the barriers to future adoption.

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