"Clearly we are far from having reached stability in the mobile world. It is not surprising, then, that we still need to take a futuristic perspective and look at growth and investments in mobile technologies with a holistic and visionary focus on what the possibilities may be."

Opening Statement

When discussing mobile technologies, we often take a futuristic stance, as if we were still trying to reach the "peak" of the hype curve¹ -- the point in a growth cycle when the new technology raises inflated expectations or, more simply, is the buzzword of the day. Yet if we look at organizations today, we can see signs everywhere that we have indeed reached the "plateau" of productivity for this emerging technology, which signals that its benefits have been demonstrated and widely accepted.

Evidence that we have in fact followed the hype cycle beyond the peak is that we have already overcome the period of disillusionment. Think back to the middle of the first decade of the millennium, when many broadband cellular data services started to become available on mobile (smart) phones, but neither business nor residential customers seemed to be interested in using them. Adoption rates were initially very low compared to the high infrastructure investments that telecommunications carriers had sustained to upgrade to faster networks. These investments seem to have now paid off: adoption rates have skyrocketed, pushed by killer smartphones such as BlackBerrys, iPhones, Google-Android phones, Windows Mobile phones, and so on. Companies just joining the mobile bandwagon are reassured that they will achieve operational improvements, discover new business opportunities, and enhance their customers' experience by offering yet another channel to keep them loyal and connected.

Or, maybe not.

That's because the state of plateau in the hype curve is not only characterized by recognized benefits and wide user acceptance. The plateau is also synonymous with stability: changes and innovations are expected to be incremental rather than exponential. In a way, the expectation at plateau is that of a rather stable technological progression. Clearly we are far from having reached stability in the mobile world. In fact, technological advances (from standards to sensors, equipment, providers, frequencies, etc.) in mobile infrastructure and applications occur daily, and the only thing we can expect is that the next release is going to be much better than the previous one. It is not surprising, then, that we still need to take a futuristic perspective and look at growth and investments in mobile technologies with a holistic and visionary focus on what the possibilities may be. Nor is it surprising that some enterprises will continue to be cautious in their adoption of these technologies and may want to play a laggard rather than an early adopter role.² They are concerned about cannibalizing existing products, security and privacy breaches, data interoperability problems, and/or the need to finally figure out new and complementary business models.

This ambivalent attitude -- willingness to jump on the bandwagon and caution in doing so -- is also reflected in the articles presented in this issue of Cutter IT Journal. While all the articles take a positive view of the opportunities opened up by mobile technologies, the stories they narrate also show that challenges persist, and that organizations are slowly dealing with them by expanding their strategies, scoping their markets, implementing better security, or piloting enhancements and new business models supported by novel architectures. As you read the articles, I am confident that you will recognize this tension. I hope that they will be a starting point for further reflection on how to join an evolution that will require agility, flexibility, and working at increasing data transfer rates, from anyplace and at anytime.

We begin with an article by Charlie Bess, a fellow at the Office of Technology and Strategy of HP Enterprise Services. Bess encourages readers to take a comprehensive look at the opportunities and changes that mobile technologies are bringing at multiple levels of the enterprise, but specifically at "the edge." He addresses existing and future changes in outreach capabilities, data collection and management, and, finally, changes to the workflow and the workplace. His idea of "rethinking the edge" is appealing, as it may help focus organizations on the exploitation of supplier/partner/customer relationships (those at the edge of the enterprise) that might have been overlooked by an inward focus on internal implementation and management. Many opportunities for innovation will indeed come from the edge of the enterprise, and managers must be ready to quickly recognize them.

Next, Jesse Greco of Pitney Bowes and Niel Nickolaisen of Energy Solutions tell a captivating story about the aforementioned ambivalence that firms (even large and seasoned ones) continue to feel toward mobile applications. In their case study, they tell of a development team's resilience, which finally led to the successful deployment of an enterprise mobile application, even though that application was initially rejected by management as a potential threat to existing coding efforts. The authors share the lessons the team learned as they contended with a traditional and inflexible management structure, which was mostly held back by the inability to envision the benefits of quickly transitioning to mobile. I am sure that readers who face similar administrative/governance obstacles will find the team's approach an interesting and useful model to replicate.

The next two articles deal with security in the mobile world from very different perspectives. David Lineman, an IT professional and expert on information security policy and regulatory compliance, alerts us to the increased security threats that are presented by mobile enterprises and discusses many of the risk factors. These risks are exacerbated by a slow-moving and mostly reactive legislative framework that often plays catch-up with technological advancements. Lineman provides many useful risk mitigation strategies, but above all he encourages organizations to take a truly user-centered security mindset. He observes that while companies are aware that security breaches are mainly related to human errors, most of their investments continue to be in technical solutions rather than user education. Lineman presents data from the 2009 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey indicating that spending on security awareness training was less than 1% of total security spending. This is a striking misalignment between the recognized causes of a problem and the solutions applied to it. I hope that your organization is not part of these statistics.

Phillip Whisenhunt of Virginia Tech and Ronald Vetter of the University of North Carolina Wilmington also tackle the issue of security, but with a specific focus on the security of mobile devices and their susceptibility to malware attacks. In their article, they review the types of infection routes for mobile malware and report the results of a test they performed using the security penetration toolkit BackTrack 4. They find that despite the increasing numbers of mobile devices used worldwide, the volume of attacks remains relatively low. In specific cases, such as Bluetooth connectivity, the spreading of viruses may be limited in range and mobility, allowing time for a quick containment. Regardless of these hopeful findings, they also share a set of countermeasures and suggestions for risk prevention derived from the published literature. IT managers will find their checklist a valuable tool for evaluating the preparedness of their organization.

Our final two articles offer very interesting examples of mobile technologies from different industries. Edmund Schuster of MIT's Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and Oracle's Hyoung-Gon Lee discuss the very important issue of "convergence," specifically the interoperability of data exchanged through multiple networks. Their example focuses on agriculture, specifically the Florida citrus industry, where growers are testing the use of mobile devices such as 3G smartphones to speed data collection efforts by human scouts who walk the fields looking for signs of disease outbreaks. The added bonus of data collection via 3G phone is the ability to better pinpoint the exact location of the observations through the phone's GPS capabilities. However, data from the fields needs to be combined with data from other sources, such as weather data, and this combination poses a unique challenge. The authors describe how they solved this problem with the development and testing of a prototype for data interoperability. Their strategy, model, and architecture will provide interesting insights for other industries dealing with similar issues.

Finally, Chaka Chaka brings us to South Africa, with an example from the social networking world "gone mobile" with MXit, an instant messaging application that has enabled its developers (MXit Lifestyle) to gain market share in over 120 countries, claiming 19 million subscribers to date. This article zooms in on business models used by the company and describes its effectiveness in leveraging emerging mobile delivery capabilities offered by mobile cloud computing. Chaka presents detailed examples of the software tools and the additional innovations in store. The article encourages further identification of successful business models in the mobile technology market that may be of interest to companies still hesitant to invest in this area.

Overall, I hope that this issue has achieved the objective of looking at both the opportunities as well as the difficulties of implementing mobile technologies in enterprises. Technological instability and social adaptation issues abound, but they are also the drivers for continued growth. The technological instability is pushed by a fervent innovation; the user adoption (and adaptation) issues are both limitations and drivers of the incessant evolution. As the case presented by Greco and Nickolaisen shows, once the users understand the benefits, they actually demand more and more. This is why, as a key decision maker and driver of innovation in your organization, you should continue to look at all the possibilities, even the less obvious ones. You may just find that a lot more opportunities will open up either at the edge, as Bess says, or just around the corner.

ENDNOTES

¹ For more information on the hype cycle, see: Fenn, Jackie, and Mark Raskino. Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time. Harvard Business School Press, 2008.

² Moore, Gregory A. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. Revised edition. HarperBusiness, 1999.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katia Passerini is an Associate Professor and the Hurlburt Chair of Management Information Systems at the School of Management of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), where she teaches courses in MIS, knowledge management, and IT strategy. Dr. Passerini is a frequent contributor to Cutter Benchmark Review. She has also been published in refereed journals, such as Computers & Education, Communications of the ACM, Campus-Wide Information Systems, Communications of AIS, Society and Business Review, Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, and International Journal of Knowledge Management, as well as several peer-reviewed proceedings, particularly in the area of computer-mediated learning, IT productivity, and mobile communications. Her professional IT experience includes multi-industry projects at Booz Allen Hamilton and the World Bank. Dr. Passerini earned both an MBA and a PhD in information and decision systems from George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC. While at GW, Dr. Passerini was part of the learning and technology unit that supported the creation and deployment of distance learning courses university-wide. She worked as an instructional and multimedia specialist focused on faculty training and pedagogical effectiveness. She can be reached at pkatia@njit.edu.