McCombs School of Business
Knowledge

The Future Is in Your Palm

Masons, firemen, top-managers, traveling salespeople, pizza delivery boys, journalists. What do those professions have in common? Those people spend lot of time, if not all their time, out-of-office. And what is more important is that they need information support that is as high-quality as that which in-office workers get.

Current information systems have problems with providing information to the mobile workers. Current solutions are usually cumbersome or they do not exist at all. The question arises: can companies provide information to their mobile workers in a more efficient way? My answer to this question is “yes, they can.” I believe that companies can provide information to their out-of-office more efficiently using handheld computers.

Handheld computers have many benefits: they are light, relatively cheap and many mobile professionals already own them. Important is also the fact, that mobile devices use very similar protocols to those used in desktops, so the main problem about developing applications for them is to adjust forms and windows to the smaller screen.

Mobile devices have also many limitations. Among the most problematic are the size of the screen, the speed of the processor, the bandwidth and the difficulties with data entry. These are limiting factors for some applications, especially decision support applications that need to work with large charts and tables, but in many cases it is not such a big problem.

Handhelds can be used in many industry sectors. The most common applications are in distribution and healthcare. Among products that are already in the market I would like to mention Siebel’s Mobile CRM and SAP’s Mobile Portal for mySAP.

If you will read this article you will learn more about the following:

If you want to print the whole paper, you can download it as a Word document.

Jan Smolik, December 11, 2002 , email: Jan.Smolik@email.cz

 

 
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