a guest entry from Jim Chard
Customizable applications mean that applications are not only dynamic, changing with the company’s business needs, but that the cost of maintaining and enhancing the applications is driven down because customizing is accomplished office admin staff rather than expensive programmers and systems integrators.
Each corporate customer is unique and, recognizing its uniqueness, will refuse to adopt a shrink wrapped, one-size-fits-all solution. Even in homogeneous sectors like banking, standard procedures are conducted in very different ways. In order to convince field managers to change their current practices and give up paper, companies and wireless software vendors will need to tailor wireless solutions to the unique, specific needs of field operations.
Wireless is the most recent cycle of personalized computing power. Each evolutionary cycle of computer development from mainframe to mini to client server to handheld has manifested a closer and more personal relationship between device and user. An increasingly personal relationship demands continual change and customization of the application and the interface presented to the user.
Wireless applications allow companies to become real time processing entities. Real time in turn allows companies to rapidly evolve to meet changing competitive, economic, and global changes. The rapidly mutating corporation, changing to meet these demands, will of necessity need to alter its business processes on a highly accelerated scale. No place will this be more true than among mobile workers in the field. Their wireless applications and tools will need to change and adapt just as their corporation is changing. Static applications will rapidly obsolesce. Only if the applications are customizable, changeable, and malleable will field operations be able to keep pace with the changes in their companies.
As the price of devices and over-the-air transport are driven down, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) will also be reduced accordingly. In a scenario where devices cost $50-150 and monthly data plans hover around $20/month, it is improbable that software will be priced any differently. In order for software to be priced appropriately and at the same time flexible enough to meet changing corporate conditions, wireless software needs to be customizable by its very nature. A forms-based approach which can be changed on the fly without programming would appear to be a necessity in such an environment.
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