Mobile
Business - The Emerging Trends
Mobile
Business - The Emerging Trends
Strategies for Mobile Business
Organizations that want to enter into
m-business arena must ensure that their business plans are effective and are
capable of delivering results. An in-depth understanding about the customer
requirements is very important. A successful m-business strategy must deliver
key results including shortening of new product development cycle time,
providing better information to suppliers and vendors, reducing data integrity
issues and significantly enhancing customer experience. M-Business enables
organizations to offer company information in real-time, readily accessible to
employees at any place they require thus enabling them to serve the customers
better.
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While m-business can significantly enhance customer
experience, its immediate impact can be witnessed on the business
enterprise. M-Business can significantly improve the profitability of a
business enterprise by reducing cost of operations, enhancing workforce
efficiency and improving employee retention. It also has the potential of
significantly improving the revenues of a business enterprise by opening
opportunities in new business areas and enhancing service differentiation.
M-Business can also enhance relationships of a business enterprise with
its partners and suppliers. The supply chain can benefit through
m-business in almost every process including purchasing, manufacturing,
distribution, customer service and sales. |
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Before implementing an m-business
strategy, organizations have to first understand how the use of mobile
applications will support their business objectives. They need to analyze their
existing business processes and systems that their mobile workforce would be
accessing. Finally, they have to develop entirely new mobile business processes
to enable access to business critical information.
While implementing an m-business strategy, organizations must ensure that it
should be:
- Cost Effective: The strategy must be cost effective. It should not involve a
long duration and require costly resources while implementing.
- Compatibility: The mobile application must be compatible with the industry
standard technologies. It must facilitate easy integration with the existing IT
infrastructures.
- Security: The mobile strategy must support a secure environment in which
information can transmitted securely.
- Return on Investment: Organizations must work out the return on investments of
their m-business initiatives. They must compare the benefits reaped from
mobilization and the costs involved in it.
- User-friendly: The mobile applications used by organizations must be user
friendly. It should allow access to information in real-time, and should be easy
to view and simple to navigate.
One of the most important aspects of a successful m-business strategy is user
acceptance. Even though an organization's mobile applications are
architecturally sound and are capable of delivering the required return on
investment, without end user acceptance and adoption they will not be successful
in the long term. After implementing an m-business strategy, it is important to
measure and analyze the results and use the feedback to make required
modifications. The effectiveness of an m-business strategy can be measured in
terms of the extent of benefits delivered as already mentioned above.
Mobile Business Technologies
Organizations need to identify the key technologies in m-business and their
benefits to various industries/organizations and respective functional
departments. The technologies involved in mobile communication are based on
signals, information content, operating frequency, modulation, noise and
bandwidth. They are also based on field strength, antennas, receiver
sensitivity, signal absorption, propagation and interface. The emerging mobile
technologies and its applications will decide how and when the full potential of
m-business is realized.
The emerging mobile technologies like Bluetooth, General Packet Radio System
Network (GPRS) and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) are likely to
accelerate m-business usage. One of the major mobile Internet applications will
be shopping. With the help of global positioning system based services (GPS),
customers can access to location/direction-based services. For example, a
customer can know the nearest location of the kind of store he/she is looking at
and the products being offered in the store. These services can be possible
since the mobile operator knows the address of the base station receiving the
signal.
The short message service (SMS) have been very popular since they allow a person
to keep in touch with their friends without making actual phone calls. These
services have been further enhanced with two-way video calling. Other mobile
applications include access to online stock trading and banking; voice based
unified messaging, which combines e-mail, voice mail and paging, access to hotel
and airline reservations and related information; alerts and notifications on
areas of interest; product and service information through wireless enablement
of a corporate website; wireless gaming and informational applications such as
news and weather.
The mobile technology has a great potential to extend the boundaries of a
business enterprise as well. Major opportunities exist for m-business technology
solutions for the enterprise wireless market. The growth in mobile enterprise
applications will be driven by the following factors:
- Key technology enablers such as always-available connectivity, higher mobile
bandwidth, and location based services.
- Advanced wireless application development and mobile security.
- Demand fulfillment for end-to-end wireless applications for enterprises at low
cost.
However, the major challenge for organizations is to use wireless technologies
and applications to enhance the relationship with the customer. This needs to be
done while providing applications that are easy-to-use, fulfill the requirements
of customers, are actionable and informational, and support all sets of devices,
networks, and standards used by individual consumers and business enterprise.
Mobile Business - Issues and Challenges
Mobile Business - Industry Applications
2004, ICMR Case Studies and Management Resources. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted
in any form or by any means - electronic or mechanical, without permission.
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