The Business Challenge of Going Mobile
With the rampant explosion of wireless smart phone devices in the marketplace, it should be no surprise that more and more businesses are delving into the mobile world. Whether it's for productivity gains by arming staff with more ready access to data, or from marketing pressure to remain competitive and become more visible and viable with prospects, or to meet customer trends by appealing to the next generation audience – today's business applications are going mobile.
Beyond email and messaging services which are already widely used, mobile applications could range anywhere from event registration or other form-based applications, scanning for inventory updates, field worker schedule task lists to shopping cart applications and marketing schemes based on GPS locations and more.
Less than a decade ago, the choices were largely between Palm OS or Windows Mobile, and the primary challenge with wireless business applications involved available bandwidth and network coverage. Data throughput capabilities were, and can still be, more limited, with spotty reception in some remote geographical areas. Today, there are so many more devices that support varying platforms and operating systems (Apple iPhone, RIM Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, Symbian, etc), and so much more diversity in application technologies along with faster networks and coverage. With such diverse and ever changing capabilities along with aggressive competition for market share, the business decision of going mobile is no simple matter and constantly evolving.
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How Does Your Organization Manage Content?
Information Overload
We are facing a crisis in information Management called “the data deluge” by the Economist in a February 2010
study. A sample metric cited in the report is that WalMart handles 1 million customer transactions per hour and has 2.5 petabytes of archived data (equivalent to 167 times the number of books in the Library of Congress). This graph forecasts the growing gap between the information created versus available storage.
Legal requirements for storing images of business documents, executive appetite for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing systems and the Social Media tsunami - with its attendant unstructured data formats - have all contributed to this growing demand. To further compound the management challenge, multiple constituents now expect that more parts of a business are available on-demand. How well is your organization coping with the need to manage content and all the ways it needs to be created, stored, consumed and categorized? Perhaps you need a system designed specifically to manage unstructured content?
What is Content Management?
Content management is the process of organizing and consolidating these pieces of content (text, graphics and multimedia clips) and tagging schemes (XML, HTML, etc) in the most efficient way and storing them only one time in a repository, known as a Content Management System (CMS). The organized content can then be used over and over again (content reuse) for many different publications and repurposed for multi-channel publishing.
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