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Follow UsBANGALORE: While the benefits of mobility in the enterprise in terms of productivity and faster turnaround time stand proven, CIOs are waiting for prices of devices to drop.
During a Dataquest CIO summit 2006 panel discussion today on enterprise mobility strategy, Mrinal Chakraborty, GM-IT and services, said, “We are looking for a mobility device in the range of Rs 10,000-15,000 for field workers, but the ones in the market are beyond this price point. We need a systems that can store and forward data.”
Nokia’s country general manager, GK Chakrapani said that the sweet spot would be around Rs 10,000.
“However Nokia is not looking just at the device cost which form only about 15 per cent of the total cost, but also at the cost of operations, access and service.” He added that this market has to be created.
In his keynote address, Vinay Deshpande, CEO, Encore Software, touched on how mobility was pervading various segments including aircraft maintenance and healthcare. Taking a crystal ball view of mobility in 2015, he predicted that the mobile worker would wear rather than carry computing power.
“Keyboards and displays would be virtual and agent software will handle administration duties like filling in forms making the worker more productive,” he said.
In his presentation on setting up a mobile enterprise, Vijay Subramanyam, senior manager, KPMG, warned of the risks involved in mobile computing. “There have been cases in the US where a laptop with 16,000 social security numbers was stolen and a case where a person sold his used Blackberry on ebay unaware that his information had not been erased from the device.”
He said that critical information like network passwords, customer data, credit card and account numbers, financial information and employee information should not be stored on PDAs.
Subramanyam suggested stronger passwords, controlled usage, disallowing peer-to-peer networks and encrypted storage as some of the ways to enforce better security among mobile workers.
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