Mobile grows up

Matt Norce has watched mobile computing evolve.

Four years ago, Norce, network administrator at J.C. Ehrlich, a Reading, Pa., pest-control company with 42 offices in five states, began giving mobile workers PDAs from HP.

He used synchronization software from Extended Systems to load appointment information and driving directions on the devices. But the 120 exterminators in the pilot project quickly asked for more functionality. "People start out with basic [personal information managment] applications. Then they see the potential of the software and they want to do enterprise apps too," Norce says.

As a result, the pest-control company has added CRM and e-mail to its mobile arsenal. Working with Weidenhammer Systems, a Reading development firm, J.C. Ehrlich's team built a CRM application specifically for PDAs, avoiding many of the headaches that businesses face when they try to squeeze an enterprise application onto mobile devices.

The pilot program is being extended to all of J.C. Ehrlich's exterminators. On the hardware side, the HPs were replaced a while back with NEC MobilePros, "which are still our No. 1 unit," Norce says. And the company is rolling out newer NEC models that run Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system.

According to Gartner, 55% of large companies plan to move their pilot mobile applications into production this year. The primary reason is competitive pressure; with customers and trading partners growing more demanding about speed and quality of service, large businesses need to get useful data out to their mobile workers.

But only 25% of mobile application deployments will succeed this year, according to Gartner. The research firm says "social factors" - such as the introduction of wireless technology to workers who aren't ready for it - and bad architectural choices will be the major problems.

The good news is that mobile applications have matured enough so that a body of best practices has taken hold. Tips from analysts and businesses can help you learn from other IT organizations' pain.

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Pitney Bowes rethought its mobility program when the Stamford, Conn., mail and document-management giant undertook a sweeping reorganization. A division of the company had equipped its field service agents with handheld devices long ago. But "it was a proprietary system designed to look inward," says Ralph Nichols, Pitney Bowes' service program manager for document-messaging technologies.The system had other flaws too; it was a batch system relying on data that might be up to two weeks old, and most input and output was in code rather than text, "so until you intimately knew the codes, the information in the machine didn't have a lot of value," he adds.

The primary product sold and serviced by Nichols' division is Console Inserter, which is used by corporations with high mailing volumes to insert documents such as credit-card statements and utility bills in envelopes. A console inserter is a complex machine with many mechanical, electronic and software components.

Two years ago, Pitney Bowes standardized on Siebel Systems as its CRM and field-service application provider. But Siebel lacked wireless capability. For that, Pitney Bowes turned to Antenna Software, which offers a product called Antenna A3 for Siebel Field Service.

Antenna calls its underlying system A3 Mobile Foundation. The XML-based system supports diverse networks and carriers (including Code Division Multiple Access, General Packet Radio Service and two-way paging) and optimizes data transport accordingly, the company says. When Pitney Bowes technicians are out of network reach, the system stores their data input, then forwards it when they regain network access.