Foolish Enterprise Mobile Technology Purchasing

author: John Huffman

One of the most frustrating things I see in the enterprise mobile technology space is the deliberate under specing of hardware to save a few nickles. Clearly it is a good idea to be careful with capital spending, but when you are eliminating the possibility of future functionality you are just being foolish.

I’ve seen this in many forms, such as rolling out a thousand batch devices to the field because the current application doesn’t require wireless LAN.  The company saves $50,000 on a one million dollar plus capital spend, everyone congratulates themselves on how they saved a little bit of money and they forever eliminate the possibility of rolling out a wireless application.

Or the other example that always drives me insane is specing out the minimum memory footprint because who would ever want to run something other than a terminal emulator on these devices.  They are after all real computers, with real capabilities.  Maybe someday we could run a real application on these terminals.

And perhaps the worst is purchasing a device that already has an obsolete version of the operating system loaded when it is purchased, particularly as a new device.  Oh we can get a “great” deal on this CE 4.1 device, that won’t run my .NET CF2 apps, has an obsolete web browser, dll crunch and will be an overall disaster to deal with.

The real problem I see is that purchasing still take the short-sighted perspective that the mobile infrastructure will only be needed for the current project.  In the past, that may have been reasonable since developing, deploying, maintaining a single application on a DOS hand held was about all it could handle.

Now the mobile devices should really be considered hand held computers that can be used for any number of tasks.  Today it could be a simple terminal emulator that runs the application, but next year it’s a set of mobile applications to handle inventory, gift registry, mobile communications, web applications and more.

In the consumer world, devices come and go as the seasons, or the two year service contract.  Which is fine when your talking about a $200 dollar investment.  But in the corporate world, the cost is in the millions of dollars every time you upgrade the device.  Obviously this makes it a much different decision and leads company to change the handheld every ten years or more.  Go out to your local retailer and see how many are still stuck in the past using DOS terminals from the 90s.

So if your making a mobile device purchase for you company please consider the future.  Always spend the extra couple of dollars now to maximize the capabilites of the device in the future.  By spending a little bit now, the useful life of the device will be extended for several more years in to the future, and new applications, with real ROI, all without a huge capital cost.