Questions to Ponder before Starting a Mobile Software Development Project for Handheld PDAs, iPhones and Smartphones

This article identifies some basic questions that should be asked and pondered by the business user and software development teams before starting on a mobile software development project:
  1. Do you anticipate needing one mobile software application, or many? Can you start with a mobile software development platform that supports all of your mobile application needs, or will each mobile application be a separate IT project and use different development technologies and infrastructures (e.g. Windows Mobile, Google Android, RIM Blackberry, Symbian, iPhone, etc.)?
  2. Do you know your exact solution and data requirements in advance? Do you anticipate needing to edit and adjust your mobile application as you learn from your field users and their experiences? Can it be hard coded, or does it need to be flexible and easily edited? The answers to these questions will impact both design and schedules.
  3. Do you have an in-house software development capability, budget and helpdesk infrastructure to enable you to develop and support your own mobile application(s)?
  4. Are you going to outsourcing the development of your mobile software application's design, development and deployment to an experienced mobility company, or build it internally?
  5. Will you be synchronizing your field data with one back-office database, or multiple database applications? How will you do this? Are you using a middleware solution in this process?
  6. Do you know how to integrate field data to your database applications? Do you have your own DBA that can do this? Are they involved in the data synchronization discussions. How can you ensure valid data is synchronized from the field?
  7. How secure does the mobile data synchronization need to be? The more security that is added and layered the slower the data synchronization. Does only a small part need to be secure or all of the data?
  8. Will the user always need and have internet connectivity, or will the application run equally well disconnected? Does you design take this issue into consideration?
  9. Mobile solutions are often used on laptops, Tablet PCs, Smartphones, PDAs, and rugged handhelds. Do you know your hardware requirements and user environmental requirements? Is the user environment hot, cold, dry, wet, dusty, flammable or frozen?
  10. Will you be supporting just one mobile device, or many different kinds and sizes? Is the screen size an issue? What size is the screen on your chosen devices? Is it sufficient for the work done in the field. Does the mobile worker need to read manuals, maps, images, blueprints and drawings, or just click on a few buttons?
  11. What mobile device operating system(s) will you be supporting?
  12. How will the mobile handhelds or mobile devices be carried and stored. Is the user wearing a suit, or wearing overalls in the rain. Does the environment require a rugged case, or a suit pocket? The answers to these questions impact your choice of mobile devices, operating systems and screen sizes.
  13. If your internal IT staff are developing your mobile solution, do they know how to do the following: integrate with and support GPS, Barcode scanners, RFID radios, Digital Signatures, digital cameras and synchronize data bi-directionally across multiple databases?
  14. What mobile database will you use? Does it have its own synchronization technology? If not, what mobile middleware are you going to use? Does the mobile database vendor support the operating systems you have chosen?
  15. Do you have an IT development team that is experienced in designing, developing and deploying mobile applications, or is this their very first mobility project. Can you afford the steep learning curve, time and money developing a mobile application in-house with no experience?
  16. Have you considered the implementation, training and support effort required to manage large mobile software deployments? Do you have project management and helpdesk software in place to manage it?
  17. Have you made sure that your mobile software application's database and screen design will include the data fields required by the office database application you will sync with?
  18. Does the mobile software application need to support a specific business process in SAP or other ERP? Have you designed the mobile software application to do so?
  19. One of the most challenging and complex parts of mobile application development is to create the right data model for your mobile application before you start development. Often an appropriate data model for a simple mobile application, is not the appropriate data model once you start adding features and additional modules in future versions. Is your database model designed to easily support additional components?

These are a few of the questions you will want to discuss with both the business and the technical team before you begin this effort. For more questions and possibly some answers you may want to visit this Google Knol called Mobile Software & Handheld PDA Business Strategies.

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http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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Google Latitude for Handheld PDAs, Smartphones and Work Orders

Google recently announced a new application in the world of cloud computing called Google Latitude. This is a very interesting application in that it allows friends to see where friends are located, or managers to see where his or her work teams, vehicles and job sites are located.

In the past, this functionality has only been available to companies for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (or name your currency). You could find these features on enterprise quality work order management solutions or proof-of-delivery solutions for handheld PDAs and Smartphones. Google has a way of shaking the industry up by making mobile applications free.

Today, for free, a manager can implement Google Latitude on his company issued handheld PDAs and Smartphones and see where his workers are at all times. The manager, from his desktop, can view a map of the location of all of these mobile handhelds.

In a previous article I wrote about the inefficiencies caused by a lack of management visibility and knowledge on the location of their employees, job sites and inventory. Here is an excerpt on how to waste time and money:

  1. Waste time and fuel driving back and forth to the office to pick-up and deliver new work orders, tools and parts. With the high cost of fuel, reducing driving distances is a necessity. Can you dispatch a service technician directly from their home to a nearby jobsite? Can you make sure your service technician has the most common parts in the van before they travel to the jobsite?
  2. Waste time and fuel by being unprepared for the job and driving around looking for parts. Can you reduce travel time and fuel costs by being better prepared for the job before traveling? Can you ask customers for more information on the equipment such as brand, serial number, year, location, problem etc? Can you ask the customer for a digital photo of the equipment, serial number, etc., and email it before dispatching the service technician?
  3. Sit outside of a locked and vacant location wasting time waiting for the owner to arrive. Can you set up an automated phone call to let the customer know you are on the way? This avoids showing up at a vacant house or closed business and wasting time.
  4. Send service technicians to a distant location, when another service technician is closer and available. Can you use GPS tracking on the vans to better know the location of all service technicians so you can dispatch the closest and best service technician for the job?
  5. Miss opportunities to sell more services, parts and equipment to the customer at the time of work and at the point-of-work. Can you automatically remind the service technician to promote service contracts by using a mobile handheld work order system? This will help increase service contract sales.
  6. Poor scheduling and routing. Can you schedule service contract visits based on geographic location to reduce fuel costs and wasted travel time? Can a service technician complete more service calls in a day if they are routed more efficiently?
  7. Drive large and heavy vehicles when not required. If you have a better understanding of the parts required for today’s service calls, can you take a smaller, more fuel efficient vehicle to the jobsite?
  8. Implement poor cash management and collection processes. Can you collect money, swipe credit cards and print receipts from a mobile handheld device to improve collections at the jobsite? Are you wasting time, paper and postage sending out invoices weeks after the work was completed?
  9. Too much administrative costs. Can you reduce the costs of data entry and administrative staff by automating the dispatch process by using wireless work order dispatch that is integrated directly with your work order management and accounting systems?Every company, upon self-evaluation, will be able to identify additional inefficiencies that can be corrected and reduced. Many of the costly inefficiencies can be resolved by automating and mobilizing field services business processes.
Google Latitude would allow an Operations Manager to dispatch and route his service technicians or delivery vans based upon current locations of his employees and vehicles.


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http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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Google and Cloud Computing Comes to Mobile Handheld PDAs and Smartphone Users

Google has just announced they will be offering synchronization and support for Cloud computing for mobile and wireless handheld PDAs and smartphones users including those using the:

iPhone
BlackBerry
Nokia S60
Nokia standard
Sony Ericsson
Windows Mobile

Why is this important? It demonstrates a trend that people are moving away from the view that their desktops or laptops are the center of the universe, to a view that Cloud Computing - their online Google or Yahoo Accounts are the center.

Google has now enabled synchronization directly through any wireless connection to your online account(s). Your contacts and calendars and other Google Apps no longer must be synchronized through a desktop, iTunes account or laptop. This is big news! This functionality permits the concept of a truly untethered mobile computing environment for handheld PDAs and smartphones. The home or work desktop is no longer the anchor weighing you down. You are free to move around the world and have access to your valuable content and applications.

I can't emphasize enough what a monumental change this is for mobile users. The advent of the iPhone and other convergent multi-media mobile handhelds along with synchronization to the Cloud where hundreds of Google Apps exists changes everything.

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http://mobileenterprisestrategies.blogspot.com/
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PDAs and Handhelds Used for Medical Research Projects in Peru

In this article the use of handheld PDAs on a medical research project in Peru is detailed. The handhedl PDAs provided the following benefits:

  • reduced delays
  • reduced errors
  • reduced workload
  • reduced the time it took to process medical data by 15 days
  • prevented lost data
  • patients could be monitored in a more timely manner
Here are the details of the study and the use of the handheld PDAs as was detailed in this article in the article at ITExaminer.com Patients with drug resistant tuberculosis undergo a two year regime of powerful antibiotics, including injections six days a week during the first six months, with monthly testing. The test results dictate the course of treatment. The half-month delay in getting information from the outback to the city medical facility disrupted the treatment plan.

Here is a description, as described in this article in the Hindu News, of the patient record process before the use of handheld PDAs -

Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results onto two sets of forms per patient — one for the doctors and one for the health care administrators.

From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three weeks per patient. In some extreme cases, results were temporarily misplaced and could take up to three months to be recorded. There was also greater potential for error because information was copied by hand so many times.

Collecting of data in the field and synchronizing the data to a centralized database application for immediate storage and analysis reduces the need to manually retype all of the information and eliminates time delays that may cause treatment problems. Re-typing data from paper forms introduces more errors in the data and increases the workload for clinicians, so avoiding those issues by using handheld pdas for data collection and synchronization was found to have many benefits.

Additional news articles on the use of handheld PDAs in remote locations in healthcare can be found here.

The Power of Digital Cameras on PDAs, Handhelds and Smartphones

In this morning's newspaper there was an article called, "With New Smartphones, Doctors Reinvent the House call." The article relates how a Doctor can use a smartphone, PDA or other handheld computers to quickly view x-rays and give advice remotely. Other applications mentioned were for perusing pharmaceutical libraries and for showing educating patients with anatomical drawings. Although each of these applications are useful, I believe the real power comes from the ability to remotely collaborate with other team members that can all look at the sames information, in high definition and exchange real time data and thoughts. It is amazing what can be accomplished with these new mobile devices.

Digital Cameras in handhelds, PDAs and smartphones are becoming very powerful tools. Today, Sony Ericcsson announced they have included a 12 mega pixel camera in one of their new smartphones called the Idou. In the context of the healthcare field you can image how useful 12 mega pixel photos can be to healthcare professionals where clarity of x-rays, ultra-sounds and other images are critical.

There are many other uses for powerful cameras, crystal clear images and high speed data connections. In the context of the military or field engineers, they ability to see clear satellite images of objects on the ground is very important.

Several years ago I worked on a mobile project for the state of Washington in the USA. They were doing erosion surveys around rivers and creeks. They could do in-depth studies on river erosion from satellite images, but in designated areas they wanted to look at particular events on the ground. Rugged handheld computers with excellent screens and clear photos allowed them to quickly identify objects and geological events on the ground that required a closer look. The GPS coordinates led them to the exact location and then clear photos helped them survey specific areas.

The ability to move data, in real time, from office computers and database applications to mobile devices is a complex task. The ability to quickly develop custom mobile applications that provide you with both data collection capabilities and the synchronization of data from the office takes special technology developed by companies such as MobileDataforce and others.

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