Posted by Almost all enterprises have a physical boundary and some tangible shape for its service boundary. The enterprise do all the talkings with the market/consumers/customers staying within its peripheri. Only few enterprises like mobile or wireless phone has been able to assume the shape of an amoeba – known well for being able to take almost any shape. All this is possible because of the capability of this wireless technology. So the mobile or wireless technology is now has started giving food for thought to the enterprise technology pundits to evolve different techniques to give dynamism (or so called amoebeic boundary) to their enterprise. The keyword is Enabling Mobility. This will make the enterprise reach every nook and corner of the market/jurisdiction seamlessly and enable its stake-holders to interact at their convenience.
Let us see some scenarios:
1. Banking: Now banking system has also left their original bank branches and are available on roadsides in the form of ATM. Some of the countries has allowed the banks to establish their ATMs in the median of a high street. Most of the banks provide you their servce over the internet (some infrastructure is required here like a computer system and internet connectivity). This gives a fair level of mobility but might not be available to all socio economic sections of the society. Computer penetration is poorer than that of the mobile phone. Some banks have further penetrated and established some connectivity right inside your pocket (read your mobile phone). So definitely the mobile phone is the best choice. So the buzz word in bannking is m-banking or mobile banking.
2. Bill payments: Utilities (water or electricity), Insurance and other service companies earlier used to send you a paper bill with folio section, where you put in the details of the payment instrument (cash/cheque/bankers-cheque) and deposit to their office on some particular time slot. As time passed by, they allowed you to drop the payment in a drop box. Then came the revolution of easy-bill, where you turn up at a easy-bill outlet at your convenience. But still there is some physical boundary and a pseudo-amoebic structure. Now come the mobile, so you can use a small software downloaded to your mobile to transact and pay using your credit/debit card for the service. so the mobility is complete.
3. Indian railways also crossing the physical boundary. Now, the train ticket examiner checks your ticket and updates the system using the PDA in his/her hand. The system is updated immediately, so that updating the reservation charts in the stations ahead can be updated in accordance.
We can cite a lot of such scenarios coming up. Thinking forward we can also consider business like doing a billing on the spot. Spot-billing is already there, though the billing logic is currently simpler in such scenario or there are a lot of pre processing in this case. In the future, we might see the whole billing solution can break the boundary.
Be here after some time. There will be some new update on this…