When the phone rings, a text comes in, or I need to pull up some data from an app, I really don't distinguish among the many devices sitting on my desk. The medium, in this case, is not the message - I just want to feast on the message. Hopefully, that message is valuable enough that the pursuit and consumption enables me to do my job more effectively and efficiently.
And in accessing via mobile devices, there's typically a notion that it's effortless and seamless - when Jack Bauer did it on 24, he just made a phone call to the nerdy guys who shot a finely-tuned GPS image with neutron-tracking coordinates and human tissue identification capabilities, and in 17 minutes the nuclear bomb was detonated and a really attractive woman was rescued. All done with a mobile device. And some kung fu. Oh, and his battery never went dead. Man, I wish I was Jack Bauer.......oh, um, anyway...
The point here is that mobile devices are changing the way we work. We know that. We knew that about six years ago. But now, and yes it took this long, big honking companies WANT you to be more effective with mobile devices and everyone is working feverishly to make this happen.
But while intentions are admirable, and money is being allocated, there are still a lot of PowerPoints being slung by planners who still don't get it and are thinking more about maximizing data plan costs than making you and me more functional with our iPhones. And if that continues, then we'll continue to live in a world where our apps don't easily integrate, security issues impede our ability to get things done, and we can't dismantle nuclear bombs on our way to lunch.
sanjay.poonen(President and Corporate Officer for SAP Global Solutions) and Ian Finley (Research VP for Gartner) will be presenting at one of our Mobile Insights Webcasts on July 10 and it will address some of these very same points. The Webcast is titled, "Critical Capabilities for Mobile Application Development Platforms", and we invite you to register and join us.
Our man-in-mobile, eric.laihas brilliantly laid out the issues that Sanjay and Ian will be discussing in his Forbes blog, "To Do Mobile Right, Every Company Needs these Three Things". Eric doesn't get distracted with dreams of saving the world, so I suggest you read this - he's, as always, spot-on and prescient, and will make you re-think your mobile enterprise strategy.
I gotta get back to work - if these emails aren't answered in the next 23 hours, who knows what will happen...
