|
http://www.oracle.com/technology/oramag/oracle/06-mar/o26field.html
|
Riding the Mobile
applications are coming. Are you ready? If you haven't been
involved with mobile applications yet, you will be. Mobile applications are
becoming indispensable for helping organizations reach goals of increased
productivity, reduced vulnerability, and improved customer service.
Developing applications for wireless platforms presents unique challenges.
Let's look at what makes mobile apps so valuable that it's worth tackling these
challenges. Critical Response Companies spend a lot
of time, money, and effort to keep their systems up and running, because
downtime reduces productivity and discourages customers. Reducing mean time
to repair is critical, because when the system stops, the business stops. The Standish Group has
estimated that system downtime costs the average surveyed company about
US$500,000 an hour. That's a lot of money, especially when IT needs about an
hour to respond, diagnose, and fix a problem. (For a white paper summarizing
this and other research, refer to "Realizing
ROI from Mobile Management of IT Systems"). When I worked for
USRobotics as a DBA, I always carried an on-call pager. I experienced
firsthand the problem that many companies face: more than one-third of alerts
are received when it is difficult to respond quickly, either off-site with no
dial-up connection, on-site while not at your desk, or while commuting. In
these situations, the DBA (or the expert or problem solver) becomes the
single point of failure in the system. It was clear to me that any
application that could reduce response time would be good for everyone
involved, reducing my support headaches and lowering my company's vulnerability
to system disruptions. That was the origin of
my first mobile application, Pocket DBA for Oracle. With this utility running
on a wireless PDA, DBAs have secure, real-time access to their organization's
database. They can work directly and immediately on any problems and resolve
issues rapidly. The mean time to respond drops from about 22 minutes to about
2 minutes. This kind of
significant change affects the entire organization. Essentially the
organization leverages the power of this single mobile application to reduce
vulnerability to downtime, avoid lost productivity, and improve customer
satisfaction. And that's only one application. Developing Pocket DBA
for Oracle required overcoming some serious programming challenges. The
issues included managing significant data transfer over a low-bandwidth
connection, installing the kinds of security that are necessary to avoid
exposing vital database secrets, surmounting (or trying to surmount)
limitations on graphics, and simplifying the user interface. These
considerations are all important and should be addressed in planning for any
mobile application. After you meet these
challenges for one application, you can use the same methods to create other
mobile applications that can use the same leverage to improve productivity
and customer satisfaction for other business problems. PDAs can change from
electronic day planners to viable platforms running real applications.
Consider sales, for
example. Conventional wisdom says that salespeople should spend their time
with customers rather than in the office. Yet, if they're with a customer,
how can they access the essential, up-to-the-minute data residing back at the
company's database? How can they enter orders? How can they arrange logistics
of manufacturing and delivery? With mobile applications, running on a highly
portable PDA or similar platform, that's how. Selling is not the
only area that can benefit from mobile applications. What about medical personnel
in a hospital keeping in touch with necessary patient data and scheduling?
How about ser-vice or delivery personnel primarily out on the road? How about
real estate, utilities, banking, insurance, or construction? It's hard to
imagine a business that couldn't benefit from mobile applications providing
data access wherever workers happen to be. Changing How Business Works Mobile applications
could radically change the way we do business. The companies that implement
mobile apps first can expect to enjoy an advantage —for now. Because
what's now a bonus for some will soon be a necessity for all. Get ready for
it. |
