A PDA is now serious business

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This article was first published in SME 2010 magazine

Now that every tom, dick and harry seems to be aware of mobile ‘apps’ – largely down to Apple raising the profile through the launch of its iPhone – organisations need to recognise how ‘apps’ can make businesses more effective and realise that they don’t just exist to allow individual users to play with virtual pint glasses or try to use their device as a spirit level. So, what’s actually behind a PDA – Personal Digital Assistant - and what sort of information can an organisation send, collect, and act upon to make it more effective?

Thinking about field service-orientated organisations, it might be a case of creating and sending out jobs to an engineer’s PDA, having dynamic forms which an engineer can fill in whilst working on the job, getting a customer signature directly on to a device, and taking photographic evidence before and after the job is done so that all the information is captured in a single time period. All this information can be sent from a PDA into a back-office system or secure website within seconds, where a manager is able to view the data in real-time and act upon it or use it as part of a management report almost immediately. Continue reading