Military Use of PDAs & Monitoring Grass Clippings

A few months back one of my sales reps came into my office to brag about a new customer. Seems they had sold our Intercue Mobility Suite to the US Airforce. I get excited about sales to large organizations so wanted to learn the details. I could image all kinds of mission critical applications involving the war on global terrorism. I could see the press releases, articles, news interviews and a visit with Oprah on the horizon, but alas it was not to be.

Our application was mission critical only to the groundskeepers on the US Airforce base in Germany. Seems they needed to inspect hedges, lawns, sprinkler systems, third party landscape contractors, flower beds and the removal of grass clippings.

OK, not as exciting as I had hoped, but valuable none the less. Their current method of tracking the quality and work to be done on the landscape of this very large military base was to document everything on paper forms. This data would then be entered into a database application in the office to manage the work and dispatch landscape maintenance crews. By automating this process using electronic forms on PDAs that synchronized with their database application, they were able to make this process much more efficient.

Oprah will have to wait.