The Quest for Mobility: Designing Enterprise Application Framework for M-Business Practices

With the advent of the “road warrior,” a growing part of the workforce is mobile and using all sorts of mobile devices to stay in touch and transact business. As the global economy shifts toward the mobile economy, enterprises need to be progressively more flexible and globalize. Mobile businesses open up new opportunities for innovative enterprises and give them new means of communications with customers and employees. In a changing business landscape, mobile business addresses new customer channels and integration challenges. The current transformation is simply the movement of e-business to a mobile environment. It is still a developing concept as are the business models that support it. The usefulness of the mobile channels will be largely driven by new enterprise applications that enhance the overall customer values. This paper provides a broad discussion on the movement of mobile integration strategies. Several issues will be addressed, such as value chain, the data access of mobile computing, m-business application framework, and the future development of mobile computing. All of these efforts attempt to provide an overview and schematics for the integration of modern e-business application strategies into future m-business practices. This paper will show that any proposed system or strategy must recognize the primary value and mechanism of how people “work,” and technological solutions must be devised in order to facilitate people who conduct business. With mobile technologies, enterprise applications will go beyond the four walls of organizations to a workforce on the mov