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May 16, 2005 (Computerworld) --
I quietly chuckle to myself when someone talks about "the wireless enterprise" as though there's some monolithic definition of what that is. The fact is that wireless applications vary dramatically, depending on whether your organization has workers in hard hats atop utility poles, or nurses gliding between hospital rooms in silent sneakers, or slick traveling salesmen cutting deals in airport lounges.
That's why, in this special report, we've examined how wireless technologies are being applied in five very different vertical industries: health care, government, utilities, manufacturing and financial services. The leaders and laggards among those industries might surprise you. According to the Mobile Plans Index developed by Forrester Research, the financial services industry -- usually a voracious user of emerging technologies -- is among the slowest to adopt mobile IT, while the usually conservative government and health care sectors are well ahead.
To make it an even more complicated matrix, Forrester analyst Carl Zetie says we have to consider the different needs of three types of mobile applications that may be used within the same industry or company: those for field workers, those for roaming information workers, and sensors for asset or inventory management. At the moment, these applications are all sprouting up on an ad hoc basis as "isolated islands of mobile functionality" within the enterprise, Zetie says.
He warns that pretty soon we'll need to figure out how to centrally manage this hodgepodge of wireless applications in order to control costs, avoid incompatible technologies, provide consistent tech support and limit security risks.
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