Mobile Business - The Emerging Trends: research paper

Mobile Business - The Emerging Trends

The past couple of years have witnessed a rapid growth in wireless communications technology. The convergence of two core technologies - the Internet and mobile wireless communications has opened up a new range of possibilities for organizations to do mobile business. Mobile Business or M-Business involves using the Internet for voice and data transmission through wireless devices. M-Business has a potential to significantly enhance customers' experience by providing them the ability to interact and transact anytime and at anyplace.

Divided in five sections, this chapter provides insights on how the use of mobile technologies has drastically changed the way businesses operate and customers interact and transact. The first section Mobile Business - An Introduction provides a broad overview of m-business and its transformational potential for both organizations and individuals. It details the benefits of mobilization and explains the significance of m-business and the emerging mobile trends. The second section Strategies for Mobile Business includes key m-business strategies, which must be implemented by any organization planning to do m-business. In addition, it discusses the strategic role of operators, content providers and other parties engaged in the mobile business value chain.

The third section Mobile Business Technologies provides detailed perspectives about the present and emerging technologies in mobile business and their benefits to various organizations. The section covers basic issues of technology from a strategic viewpoint. It also outlines a framework to enable organizations derive extra value by using mobile technologies. The fourth section Mobile Business - Issues and Challenges reveals current and emerging issues for mobile businesses and provides guidance to overcome them. The fifth section Mobile Business - Industry Applications provides real-life examples on the impact of m-business on various industries. It discusses in detail about applications on both consumer and corporate user segments. The section also details the emerging drivers of value, new organizational models and the future of m-business.  

Mobile Business - An Introduction

M-Business involves convergence of mobile telephony and the Internet technologies to offer mobile services at anytime and anyplace. It offers organizations plenty of opportunities for value creation. The mobile services are not just limited to conducting transactions but also allow communication, collaboration and co-ordination through mobile devices. In fact, the impact of goes beyond improved communication with employees and customers.                                                                            

M-Business offers several value-added services that can help mobile communications companies to not only increase their average revenue per user but also reduce customer churn. It can lead to enhanced customer loyalty since they do not receive only the 'connectivity' but also get productivity improving communications services from their mobile service provider. Such services include Internet and intranet access through mobile phones, personalized content services, personal information management, sales force automation and other services including time and expense reporting, scheduling and equipment monitoring. The benefits of doing m-business for organizations are:

• Generating new revenue streams. 
• Improving customer relationships.
• Increase in productivity.

To create successful m-businesses, organizations need to fully understand mobile user experiences. They have to develop an effective mobile strategy that can lead to:

• Maximization of value to the business.
• Decreasing time to launch a new product in the market.
• Growth in scale to meet current and future needs.
• Minimizing product developments costs.

 

 

Strategies for Mobile Business

Organizations that want to enter into m-business arena must ensure that their business plans are effective and are capable of delivering results. An in-depth understanding about the customer requirements is very important. A successful m-business strategy must deliver key results including shortening of new product development cycle time, providing better information to suppliers and vendors, reducing data integrity issues and significantly enhancing customer experience. M-Business enables organizations to offer company information in real-time, readily accessible to employees at any place they require thus enabling them to serve the customers better.

While m-business can significantly enhance customer experience, its immediate impact can be witnessed on the business enterprise. M-Business can significantly improve the profitability of a business enterprise by reducing cost of operations, enhancing workforce efficiency and improving employee retention. It also has the potential of significantly improving the revenues of a business enterprise by opening opportunities in new business areas and enhancing service differentiation. M-Business can also enhance relationships of a business enterprise with its partners and suppliers. The supply chain can benefit through m-business in almost every process including purchasing, manufacturing, distribution, customer service and sales.      

Before implementing an m-business strategy, organizations have to first understand how the use of mobile applications will support their business objectives. They need to analyze their existing business processes and systems that their mobile workforce would be accessing. Finally, they have to develop entirely new mobile business processes to enable access to business critical information.

While implementing an m-business strategy, organizations must ensure that it should be:

• Cost Effective: The strategy must be cost effective. It should not involve a long duration and require costly resources while implementing.
• Compatibility: The mobile application must be compatible with the industry standard technologies. It must facilitate easy integration with the existing IT infrastructures.
• Security: The mobile strategy must support a secure environment in which information can transmitted securely.
• Return on Investment: Organizations must work out the return on investments of their m-business initiatives. They must compare the benefits reaped from mobilization and the costs involved in it.
• User-friendly: The mobile applications used by organizations must be user friendly. It should allow access to information in real-time, and should be easy to view and simple to navigate.

One of the most important aspects of a successful m-business strategy is user acceptance. Even though an organization's mobile applications are architecturally sound and are capable of delivering the required return on investment, without end user acceptance and adoption they will not be successful in the long term. After implementing an m-business strategy, it is important to measure and analyze the results and use the feedback to make required modifications. The effectiveness of an m-business strategy can be measured in terms of the extent of benefits delivered as already mentioned above.

Mobile Business Technologies

Organizations need to identify the key technologies in m-business and their benefits to various industries/organizations and respective functional departments. The technologies involved in mobile communication are based on signals, information content, operating frequency, modulation, noise and bandwidth. They are also based on field strength, antennas, receiver sensitivity, signal absorption, propagation and interface. The emerging mobile technologies and its applications will decide how and when the full potential of m-business is realized.

The emerging mobile technologies like Bluetooth, General Packet Radio System Network (GPRS) and Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) are likely to accelerate m-business usage. One of the major mobile Internet applications will be shopping. With the help of global positioning system based services (GPS), customers can access to location/direction-based services. For example, a customer can know the nearest location of the kind of store he/she is looking at and the products being offered in the store. These services can be possible since the mobile operator knows the address of the base station receiving the signal.

The short message service (SMS) have been very popular since they allow a person to keep in touch with their friends without making actual phone calls. These services have been further enhanced with two-way video calling. Other mobile applications include access to online stock trading and banking; voice based unified messaging, which combines e-mail, voice mail and paging, access to hotel and airline reservations and related information; alerts and notifications on areas of interest; product and service information through wireless enablement of a corporate website; wireless gaming and informational applications such as news and weather.

The mobile technology has a great potential to extend the boundaries of a business enterprise as well. Major opportunities exist for m-business technology solutions for the enterprise wireless market. The growth in mobile enterprise applications will be driven by the following factors:

• Key technology enablers such as always-available connectivity, higher mobile bandwidth, and location based services.
• Advanced wireless application development and mobile security.
• Demand fulfillment for end-to-end wireless applications for enterprises at low cost.

However, the major challenge for organizations is to use wireless technologies and applications to enhance the relationship with the customer. This needs to be done while providing applications that are easy-to-use, fulfill the requirements of customers, are actionable and informational, and support all sets of devices, networks, and standards used by individual consumers and business enterprise.

 

Mobile Business - Issues and Challenges

Despite the benefits that have lead to increased adoption of m-business, it faces major challenges. These challenges can be broadly categorized into business and technological challenges. The major business challenges for m-business is its viability as a business proposition itself. As applicable in any other business proposition, following questions need to be answered to analyze its viability:

·         What is the size of the market an organization planning to enter?

·         What would be the nature of products and services being offered?

·         Who would be the customers and how will they be benefited?

·         How would an organization differentiate its products and services from its competitors?

·         Can a business make money by using this model?

·         What is the pricing strategy and how will the service be delivered?

·         What should the branding strategy?

If the answers to all the above questions are positive, the organization may consider m-business as a favorable business proposition. However, it cannot ignore the technological challenges, which may prove to be a major barrier leading to non-adoption of m-business by customers. The technological barriers to adoption of mobile technologies can be numerous. These include diverse standards for applications and networks, limited area coverage, low bandwidth, lack of security and privacy of content, diversity and complexity of devices, slow response times, primitive user interfaces, limited data storage capability, synchronization, virus attacks, lack of universal API for developing local applications and numerous other factors.   

Lot of hype has been built around the potential of mobile applications but without the proper mobile infrastructure and due to limited network access and coverage they may be meaningless. Similarly, network protocols are doubtful with different carriers adopting various next-generation technologies. Lack of common mobile platform standards to deliver m-commerce content is another major issue.

Quality issues continue to plague most mobile devices. Some problems arise due to the physical characteristics of mobile devices, while others are service-related. Small displays on mobile phones, tedious data entry, slow data transmission speeds and lack of compelling services are major obstacles to the user acceptance. Other issues related to mobile devices include:

·         The technology used by phones may be complex to understand by the consumers.

·         Some devices allowing the Internet access are expensive.

·         Many mobile carriers restrict Internet access to a select group of sites.

·         Lack of sophisticated filtering and display techniques since automatic transformation of existing Internet content is not appropriate for mobile devices.

Conclusion

Consumers are also worried about the breach of privacy and transaction related security issues while using the mobile Internet. One of the privacy concerns is the ability of mobile operators to know users' location. All mobile operators have tracking systems, which can provide location data within a few meters. This functionality could be misused adding to consumers' inconvenience. Moreover, in a similar way like PCs with Internet access, mobile devices are also prone to viruses. Hence, mobile service providers must provide a secure environment for device users.

Public Key Infrastructures is one of the best security methods to achieve complete transaction confidentiality, user and provider authentication, data integrity (data has not been changed during transmission), and payment/transaction authorization via digital signatures to ensure non-repudiation. It requires various encryption techniques during data transmission in order to achieve complete security.

Security of transmission and the data transmitted can also be achieved using Wireless Transport Layer Security for secure remote sessions between consumers and merchants or local payment protocols. Similar to PKI, strong end-to-end encryption will also help in achieving complete security.

To create successful m-businesses, organizations need to fully understand mobile user experiences. They have to develop an effective mobile strategy that can lead to:

• Maximization of value to the business.
• Decreasing time to launch a new product in the market.
• Growth in scale to meet current and future needs.
• Minimizing product developments costs.

Bibliography

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