Business Agility: Strategies for Gaining Competitive Advantage through Mobile Business Solutions

Business and Technology Assessment

In performing an M-Business strategy, you will often want to start by

exploring and documenting the “as-is” and “to-be” environmental

context in which your initiatives need to exist and provide value. This

information can often be captured via a combination of interviews,

workshops, and review of existing documentation and standards.

As-Is Environment

One of the first initiatives to perform is the assessment of the current

state business and technology environment. This can help lay the

groundwork so that the current “as-is” environment is well under-

stood and documented. In a large corporation, this can be quite a chal-

lenge and it is important to tailor the amount of effort in this phase to

the specific level of need. Generally, you will want to capture enough

information to have an inventory of current application initiatives

across the enterprise and an inventory of current skill sets, application

standards, best practices, and guidelines. The technology assessment

should give you enough information to understand what is in place

today and what can be leveraged in future M-Business initiatives.

With regard to M-Business applications, you may wish to determine

the range of wireless and handheld devices in use within the enterprise

and any current wireless applications that are in use or in a pilot stage.

Determine which devices are employee-owned and which are supported

by the enterprise. Also look outside the enterprise to ascertain what

devices such as pagers, PDAs, and handhelds are frequently used by your

customers, suppliers, and business partners. With this knowledge, you

may be able to roll out M-Business applications that support the cur-

rently available devices without having to require additional purchases

and new training. Having this information at hand provides an excellent

frame of reference as we move forward in our M-Business strategy, iden-

tify target initiatives, and prioritize opportunities. Note that it is also

important to balance the relative merits of using existing devices with the

merits of moving toward newer devices with improved functionality.

Certain M-Business applications may have limited functionality on the

currently available devices, but may have the potential for greatly

enhanced functionality on some of the newer devices. This speaks to the

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