Mobile Business - Issues and Challenges
|
Despite the benefits that have lead to
increased adoption of m-business, it faces major challenges.
These challenges can be broadly categorized into business
and technological challenges. The major business challenges
for m-business is its viability as a business proposition
itself. As applicable in any other business proposition,
following questions need to be answered to analyze its
viability:
• What is the size of the market an organization planning to
enter?
• What would be the nature of products and services being
offered?
• Who would be the customers and how will they be benefited?
• How would an organization differentiate its products and
services from its competitors?
• Can a business make money by using this model?
• What is the pricing strategy and how will the service be
delivered?
• What should the branding strategy? |
|
If the answers to all the above questions are positive, the organization may
consider m-business as a favorable business proposition. However, it cannot
ignore the technological challenges, which may prove to be a major barrier
leading to non-adoption of m-business by customers. The technological barriers
to adoption of mobile technologies can be numerous. These include diverse
standards for applications and networks, limited area coverage, low bandwidth,
lack of security and privacy of content, diversity and complexity of devices,
slow response times, primitive user interfaces, limited data storage capability,
synchronization, virus attacks, lack of universal API for developing local
applications and numerous other factors.
Lot of hype has been built around the potential of mobile applications but
without the proper mobile infrastructure and due to limited network access and
coverage they may be meaningless. Similarly, network protocols are doubtful with
different carriers adopting various next-generation technologies. Lack of common
mobile platform standards to deliver m-commerce content is another major issue.
More >> |
