.KEYWORD pervasive
.FLYINGHEAD HANDHELD INFRASTRUCTURE
.TITLE Develop your organization’s pervasive computing strategy
.DEPT
.SUMMARY In this important article, Senior Technical Editor Richard Echeandia draws parallels between the adoption of PCs and the current adoption of Palm handhelds in the enterprise. He uses this in order to form some conclusions regarding how you can prepare your organization to deal with the trends so that you can best take advantage of this exciting mobile technology.
.AUTHOR Richard Echeandia
If you’re like most IT people, you’ve doubtless noticed something creeping into your life more and more lately–PDAs. Lots and lots of PDAs. In this article, I’d like to discuss some of what’s happening in the marketplace and share with you some of the experiences that we’ve had at my company. In the end, I’ll form some conclusions about what I think is going to happen and how you can prepare your organization to deal with the trends.
.H1 A brief look back
Before we talk about the future, it’s always instructive to look at the past. With a little hindsight, it might be possible to draw parallels between personal computers and handheld computing devices. I think that as IT professionals, we can gain some insights into what might transpire with our little digital friends.
Personal computers in the very early eighties weren’t originally purchased by organizations the way they are today. A small number of individuals in certain professions like accounting and engineering purchased them, sometimes with their own money, sometimes sneaking them into organizations on their expense accounts or burying their costs within projects. The number of applications available was initially small by today’s standards and tended to be general-purpose applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and generic databases. When the co-workers of these early adopters saw the productivity gains that the new devices afforded, they, too, bought computers of their own.
Gradually, organizations saw the benefits of equipping large numbers of their employees with these productivity-enhancing tools and began to supply them to people in certain job roles automatically. The usefulness of the tool increased as the availability of a broad range of software increased. Eventually, more and more people within organizations had computers, and the need to link the individual computers together to share information in and between them increased. Local area networks were created to share resources like disk space and printers and then access and update centralized information in client/server architectures. Total cost of ownership concerns forced increased systems management of the devices to reduce overall operating costs.
Figure A illustrates this brief history of PCs.
.FIGPAIR A Here’s a brief history of PCs.
I’d like to propose that the adoption of PDAs is following the same general path. Individuals (knowledge workers and professionals) have adopted Palm handhelds and other PDAs for their own individual needs. We’re now somewhere between the second and third phases. The availability of applications has gone beyond single-user, general-purpose tools and continues to offer ever more specialized applications for a broader range of uses. Organizations are beginning to see the business benefits of supplying these devices to their employees, provided that the return on investment is warranted.
If PDAs follow the same path as personal computers, then we’ll see the following:
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET An increase in the uses to which the devices can be put (becoming more general purpose);
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET The gradual acceptance of handhelds as valid organizational productivity tools;
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET An increase in the need for interconnection between the devices so that information can be more readily shared;
.END_LIST
.BEGIN_LIST
.BULLET The requiring of more management of the devices to reduce the overall cost and increase the benefit to your organization.
.END_LIST
Figure B illustrates the probable course of Palm handhelds in the enterprise.
.FIGPAIR B Is this where Palm handhelds are headed as well?
Building on our supposition of where we are in the adoption cycle, what kinds of lessons can we learn and what might the future hold in store?
.H1 Lessons that are important to learn
The easiest productivity gains have already been achieved. They were from the optimization of individual users working on individual devices with individual data. While my Palm handheld does help me to be more productive by allowing me to have my Rolodex immediately available wherever I am and to keep my calendar up to date, the fact that I, personally, am organized generally doesn’t help anyone else where I work. The next set of improvements usually comes from sharing applications and their information among the devices and the organization’s management of the devices to reduce their costs.
You need to concentrate on those applications that have the highest return on investment to validate the usefulness of these devices and increase their acceptance. This, of course, sounds axiomatic, but it’s a point that’s frequently forgotten. If our history lesson holds true, then the sharing of information will become increasingly important. Try to think about your information as existing in layers; the more you can deliver applications from the higher layers, the more successful your use of these devices and your organization will be.
What are these information layers? The bottom layers are those applications that support the individual. Most of these applications already come bundled with the hardware when you buy it. The next layer would be making information from existing business systems and processes available more pervasively. Synchronization software is now coming onto the scene that takes data from SQL (Structured Query Language), Groupware, and ODBC (Open Data Base Connectivity) data sources and makes this information more available through synchronization and potentially even wireless device access. The top-most layer would be information relating to business processes that haven’t been possible without devices like Palm handhelds and data enabled mobile phones.
Figure C offers a visualization of these layers.
.FIGPAIR C Just as in nature, it’s better at the top of the food chain.
The last major lesson is that it’s time for your organization to start thinking about how to reduce the cost of supporting these devices in order to maximize their benefit. I was pleased when Palm announced that they intended to buy Extended Systems (at http://www.extendedsystems.com). I thought this acquisition would be an ideal one, positioning Palm to more proactively compete within the corporate sector by offering a suite of leading edge hardware and software that addressed the entire life cycle of the devices. Despite their mutual agreement to end the acquisition of Extended Systems, the two companies are continuing to work together, as evidenced by the announcement at TECHXNY that Palm will resell Extended Systems’ XTNDConnect Server Software as a Palm branded product by the fourth quarter of this calendar year. I have no doubt Palm will continue to work closely with Extended Systems and other organizations like them offering similar systems management utilities for all brands of handheld computers.
.H1 So what should you do today?
Begin working with your business sponsors and end users to identify those applications that could have the most significant impact. You can’t listen too much when it comes to your business users. Be especially alert for new uses that leverage the handheld computer’s strengths: mobility, pervasiveness, adaptability, comparatively low-cost, and ease of use. Look for more articles on this topic in PalmPower Magazine Enterprise Edition in the coming months.
Start thinking about the types of information that are the lifeblood of your business and whether it’s appropriate to make this information more available remotely. If you’re a hospital or a medical practice, you need to start having the difficult discussions about whether or not your practitioners are allowed to carry this confidential information with them on small devices that are easy to misplace or have stolen. Likewise, your sales staff may want all customers’ information always available, but you need to begin a discussion about limiting access to data when appropriate in order to reduce the entire organization’s exposure to liability or theft.
You’ll eventually need to get to the same place with your Palm handhelds as you are with your network. You probably have corporate standards for what is and is not acceptable email, what acceptable uses of the Internet are, and the individual responsibilities of employees and contractors for keeping the company’s information secure. Your PDAs will probably be the same.
Wherever possible, declare your platform intentions early. The fewer the number of devices that you have to support, the lower your organization’s overall costs will be.
Start looking at ways to manage your PDA infrastructure. Here’s another area where PalmPower’s Enterprise Edition can help. In the coming months, we’ll be reviewing several programs that promise to help bring control to this confusing area. It promises to be an interesting journey. I hope you’ll join me.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Extended Systems, visit http://www.extendedsystems.com.
For more information about Palm computers, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Bulk reprints
Bulk reprints of this article (in quantities of 100 or more) are available for a fee from Reprint Services, a ZATZ business partner. Contact them at reprints@zatz.com or by calling 1-800-217-7874.
.END_SIDEBAR
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