While every company is located somewhere on the technology adoption curve, only a few are early adopters. In the mobile enterprise application space, many of these early adopters have been utilizing powerful mobile applications for more than a decade, and have moved on to the fourth, fifth, or even sixth generation of their particular solution. In addition to the competitive advantage provided by these solutions, they have proven the mobile concept and provided a path for other companies to follow as they adopt the technology. Even if your company has a lot of experience with mobility, chances are that there is a lot you can learn from how other innovative firms have utilized mobile technology. By taking a big-picture perspective, you can begin to develop a strategy for how mobility can positively impact your bottom-line.

Discovering the opportunity

To identify where the opportunities are to improve your business, the first place to start is to examine how your competitors and other companies in your industry are using mobile technology. While basic communication is a very important function, remember to look beyond that for line-of-business applications that can drive more significant return on investment. Systems that drive task automation can improve workforce efficiency and ensure consistent process execution. Extending data or knowledge bases to give users information access anywhere can often produce unexpectedly positive results. Going a step beyond that to information processing, which combines information access with some level of task automation, is even more complex, but it drives some of the most dramatic return on investment. In addition to companies in your own industry, look at how companies in other industries are leveraging mobility. Since some industries have embraced mobility faster than others, there are many extremely mature solutions out there that can serve as a model for your own.

Evaluating the possibilities

In addition to mobile extensions of existing horizontal applications like business intelligence, customer relationship management, or workflow automation, the universe of enterprise mobile solutions includes many systems that couldn’t exist in a non-mobile environment. If you think about technologies like barcode scanning, global positioning systems, and touch screens for signature capture, you’ll recognize that these capabilities are literally building blocks that can be assembled to create powerful solutions for your business. To help your mind get started, I’ve assembled a list of horizontal solutions and potential capabilities. Read through these possibilities, and see if there are any new capabilities that you hadn’t thought about before.