Context-aware mobility can have profound business benefits

By now, companies that have put business applications on smartphones or other handheld devices know of the competitive advantages they can gain. The more detailed and relevant the information at hand, the greater the opportunity an employee has to close a sale, improve delivery times -- or even save a life.

But these are early days for enterprise mobility, and most companies stop short of realizing its full potential. While they may be delivering customer relationship management information, field service updates and other critical data to mobile devices, they're probably not delivering as much relevant information to users as they could.

To make the data more relevant, context awareness is key. In a context-aware environment, wireless devices such as environmental sensors, radio frequency identification tags and smartphones send location, presence and other status information across the network. Specialized software captures, stores and analyzes the data, sending it back over the network to provide context at the end device as needed.

"Context-aware computing has one exciting future," says William Clark, a Gartner Inc. analyst. By 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives, he predicts, noting that mobility is a subset that accounts for 80% of the context-aware field.

Think of context in this way: "It is something that can help people or other systems make decisions faster," says Chris Thompson, senior director of mobility solutions at Cisco Systems Inc. "The vision for context awareness is to expose as much of this sensory information as possible to business applications so it can be correlated with existing business roles."

Context-aware technology is available from companies such as Agito Networks Inc., Appear Networks Inc. and Cisco.

"For me, it's a no-brainer that context will become by default a requirement for mobile solutions," says Sébastien Fabre, head of innovation and planning at SITA, an airline IT provider based in Geneva.

Finding Supplies

Some of the earliest context-aware mobility projects have involved the integration of location information into wireless applications. For example, Tallahassee Memorial HealthCare Inc. (TMH) in Florida has been using location services to track assets since 2006, says Jay Adams, the health care provider's IT enterprise architect.

Context on Ice

At Pittsburgh's Mellon Arena, home of the Pittsburgh Penguins, the National Hockey League's 2009 Stanley Cup champions, some fans got a little something extra last season: live-action video streamed to their smartphones or other mobile devices.

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