Next generation mobile applications

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The ability to access your email inbox while away from the office was the 'killer app' that finally sold mobile technology to the business world.

The BlackBerry, along with its numerous copy cat clones, has become a pervasive fact of corporate life, with everyone from the chief executive to the white van driver hooked on the connectivity it delivers.

But let's face it, mobile email access is all part of the furniture now. It's a long way from the cutting edge of doing business on the move, so familiar has it become. So where will the next generation of mobile applications take us? Just what are the emerging possibilities for enabling workers in the field or working from home to achieve the same level of productivity that is available to them in the office?

Centralised information in the field

To most organisations, customer data is of paramount importance. It usually resides on a highly secure database, accessible only to those that need it via often complex customer relationship management (CRM) applications. Likewise information on product pricing and availability is usually highly centralised, as is other key data that oils the wheels of the organisation, usually available to those with desktop access to enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools.

But the point of need for all this centralised data is changing. The call centre operative and the sales manager remain primary users of this sort of information, but they are now joined by an ever broadening base of mobile employees, perhaps working from home or on the move, and needing access to the same kind of information they were able to call up when they were conventional 9-to-5ers.

There is a growing number of products that make use of a range of mobile and wireless communications technologies to allow employees in the field to drill down instantly into customer and corporate information held on head office databases. They also frequently provide management with sophisticated real-time reporting of field activities. As such they can have a direct impact on profitability by boosting efficiency and productivity at the same time as reducing costs by cutting the need for endless phone calls.

O4, for example, is a developer of 'CRM on the move' software, which runs on Windows-enabled Pocket PC client devices, and includes office-based desktop components for planning, management and analysis of field operations. The software is designed to integrate with enterprise CRM, ERP and sales automation systems.

Another product that delivers corporate data to the operative in the field is a middleware application from mobility specialist Dexterra. This provides field engineers with detailed information on their PDA about upcoming jobs, and takes them through each job step by step, with reference to head office call centres and databases.

Gartner analyst Dale Hagemeyer says he believes products like this and O4 prove that the old school stand-alone handheld has been superceded. "Retail execution and monitoring solutions used by consumer goods manufacturers or their agents have evolved from data capture and activity tasking to analytical and role-based selling tools with more power to influence outcomes in the retail environment," he said in a recent report. "These next generation retail solutions can give managers responsible for sales and sales operations a competitive advantage based on their requirements and business processes."

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