The overall research question guiding the papers’ studies of mobility-in-use in organizations is: How are different activities of temporality affected when organizations implement and use new wireless solutions in their intraand inter-organizational work and how might these temporality dimensions be linked to each other and its further meaning in an organizational context? The focus on How-questions signals an explorative, focus, where the aim is to develop knowledge on how different types of organizations adopt, integrate and use new wireless solutions. Empirically, the entire project that this paper is based on puts focus on 21 different enterprise industries and settings, grouped into eight identified “user environments” in the enterprise market for wireless services. The analyses of the enterprise markets studied have resulted in a set of models and conceptual frameworks, drawing on insights from in-depth case studies of wireless customer organizations, their users and their service providers. The paper discusses the widely and differentially used “mobility” concept. It puts aspects of temporality into the context of wireless enterprise applications and the connected mobility concept. It also elaborates on various conventional/general dimensions of temporality, followed by a discussion of potential effects on these temporal dimensions of wireless enterprise applications. The paper draws on, in a quite pragmatic way, empirical insights from the above described research project on enterprise customers of wireless solutions and the discussion is quite tentative. The paper is concluded with some implications for research and for management.

This study investigated how different users are involved in the development of new wireless applications for enterprises, here focusing on supply chain applications in the forestry industry. This article analyses the purpose, intensity and mode of user involvement when developing new wireless solutions by enterprise customers in close cooperation with solution suppliers. The article provides a theoretical overview of the research development of user involvement, with a focus on theories and concepts related to the customer involvement. An empirical case study forms the foundation for the analysis and discussion. Our investigation of the mode, intensity and purpose during the process revealed that user involvement can be described as a combination of commitment and participation components that there is an inverse relationship between the intensities of commitment and participation, and finally that user involvement can reduce uncertainties at the enabling, commissioning and impact levels.

Provides a comprehensive view of Mobility and Value, based on empirical studies as well as on the application of theoretical tools and the development of those tools. The concept of mobility is more than just a fancy word for mobiles. Rather, it is an intriguing umbrella concept embracing the complexities of a different economic landscape.

This paper draws on the need to understand how mobile technology is implemented and used at the organisational level. IT is a general-purpose technology and its use involves a high degree of uncertainty. Therefore, managers have trouble in identifying the real scope, the functionality, and the impact of new mobile applications. However, these three types of uncertainties need to be handled in change management projects where new information technology is involved. Gradual uncertainty reduction at these three different levels—that is, what technology can do, will technology work, and will users adopt it—is studied in this chapter. This is achieved through an analysis of the implementation process of an information system at BT Europe, a leading supplier of forklift trucks. The analysis shows how the computerised parts of the information system are complemented by mindful intertwining with the noncomputerised communication and manual data processing in order for the information system to work.

This paper analyzes push-pull initiatives of technological development by studying the concept of Novel Access Provisioning of new wireless Internet access to existing backbone infrastructure. The Novel Access Provisioning project is conducted within the Swedish techno-economic research project with participants from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish Telecom Agency (PTS). This paper reports on the results from a series of interviews during the fall of 2005 with main representatives from within the Telecom Industry and outside in the Nordic market having an interest in the development and use of mobile services. The aim of the paper is to increase the understanding for why some innovations have a rapid rate of adoption while others are deployed more slowly

This paper is about innovation processes studied in the light of the involvement of users during the development, implementation and usage of wireless information systems in organizations. The coincident appearance of a widely popular innovation, wireless information systems and the renewed interest for socio-technical aspects of information systems development (Wallace, Keil et al. 2004), provides the opportunity to further develop the understanding of user involvement in technology management processes.

Companies invest large amounts of money in new technologies. Not surprisingly, much of the research carried out in relation to IT-investments has focused on the adoption of new technology and the related implementation barriers such as knowledge barriers and psychosocial factors. However, the process of abandoning old technologies has not been so much in focus.In this paper, the analysis focuses on renewal investments where subsequent technology generations fulfil a similar application role. Taxi Stockholm is used to illustrate this long-term process where slowly evolving requirements on the dispatch function over time forces technology changes.A CCT-model is presented using Customers, Companies and Technology as factors to support the understanding of technology shifts. This model is used to express the relation between the application role and technology generations. The importance of considering not only a complete life cycle of a specific technology, but also multiple such technologies providing a long-term perspective is stressed.As the use of IT matures in companies, adopting new technologies increasingly means abandoning old technologies. By combining a business perspective (through the application role), a technology generation perspective and a technology switching perspective and finally adding the time component, an analytical expression is presented. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This paper analyzes the technological development of local access provisioning of wireless broadband through the study of commercial forces of push-pull character behind its development. The work is conducted within the Novel Access Provisioning (NAP) project that is a joint techno-economic research effort between the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish Telecom Agency (PTS). This paper reports the findings from a series of interviews with main representatives from actors within and outside the telecom industry confined to the Scandinavian market. The aim of the paper is to increase the understanding for the rate of diffusion of wireless broadband access solutions and to suggest innovative alternatives that may fuel its development.

Companies invest large amounts of money in new technologies. Not surprisingly, much of the research carried out in relation to IT-investments has focused on the adoption of new technology and the related implementation barriers such as knowledge barriers and psychosocial factors. However, the process of abandoning old technologies has not been so much in focus. In this paper, the analysis focuses on renewal investments where subsequent technology generations fulfil a similar application role. Taxi Stockholm is used to illustrate this long-term process where slowly evolving requirements on the dispatch function over time forces technology changes. A CCT-model is presented using Customers, Companies and Technology as factors to support the understanding of technology shifts. This model is used to express the relation between the application role and technology generations. The importance of considering not only a complete life cycle of a specific technology, but also multiple such technologies providing a long-term perspective is stressed. As the use of IT matures in companies, adopting new technologies increasingly means abandoning old technologies. By combining a business perspective (through the application role), a technology generation perspective and a technology switching perspective and finally adding the time component, an analytical expression is presented. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the economic context of the Third Generation Mobile Communication Licensing process carried out in Sweden. The discussion of the mobile licensing process has been very much centred on auctions. However, beauty contests to award UMTS-licences were implemented by a relatively large number of countries. This article investigates the implications of the beauty contest as the method for selecting 3G licence holders in Sweden. This study was prepared at the Stockholm School of Economics as part of a series of Telecommunication Case Studies produced at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Companies invest large amounts of money in new technologies. Not surprisingly, much of the research carried out in relation to IT-investments has focused on the adoption of new technology and the related implementation barriers such as knowledge barriers and psychosocial factors. However the process of abandoning old technologies has not been so much in focus. In this paper the analysis focuses on renewal investments where subsequent technology generations fulfil a similar application role. Taxi Stockholm is used to illustrate this long-term process where slowly evolving requirements on the dispatch function over time forces technology changes. A CCT-model is presented using Customers, Companies and Technology as factors to support the understanding of technology shifts. This model is used to express the relation between the application role and technology generations. The importance of considering not only a complete life cycle of a specific technology, but also multiple such technologies providing a long-term perspective is stressed. As the use of IT mature in companies, adopting new technologies increasingly means abandoning old technologies. By combining a business perspective (through the application role), a technology generation perspective and a technology switching perspective and finally adding the time component, an analytical expression is finally presented.

Bringing the Enterprise System to the Frontline - Intertwining Computerised and Conventional Communication at BT Europe

In this paper we explore the opportunities for exploiting mobile technology in business processes. The paper addresses this research question by exploring the issues both conceptually and empirically. Our main aim in this paper is to develop an opportunity discovery framework to assess to what extent mobility could improve the performance of a business process. We propose a method to systematically derive opportunities by taking the existing business process and by gradually increasing the mobility of the participants in the process (and thus complicating their locations). The more mobile the actors are, the higher the geographical barriers, and the less feasible the use of traditional information systems becomes. We present two case studies of existing mobile business processes, and we show how the mobile information systems that were used in these business processes can be identified through our method.

The constant pressure to achieve increased efficiency and profitability improvements drives companies to look at new technologies for ways to develop sustainable advantages. At the same time, the breathtakingly rapid technological development of these technologies leads, not surprisingly, to different misconceptions about the impact of IT on businesses. This dissertation aims at clarifying some of these misconceptions by exploring one such technological breakthrough, namely wireless information systems, as used to support mobile workforces. The dissertation analyses three companies devoted to the implementation of wireless information systems, that were confronted with a number of challenges, and investigates how these challenges were met by means of different capability development activities.Evidence from the cases shows that what really matters is not the technology in itself, but how organizations use it. This study suggests that the firms that give the best performance are not necessarily those that implement different breeds of technology, but rather those that are able to learn from the challenges they are confronted with – doing so moreover on repeated occasions by means of interlinked organizational innovation processes. Thus, a piece of advice offered in this dissertation is that it is not always so important to possess all the right capabilities from the beginning, but that one needs to possess the right capabilities to develop new capabilities.

Identifying and assessing the benefits of mobile technology in a business context is often problematic. In this paper we start from the position that the benefits of mobile technology are hard to quantify in isolation, and that the unit of analysis to identify value should be the business process. An exploratory case study approach is used to identify the benefits of mobile technology at the level of the business process. We describe two cases from Sweden (vehicle dispatching and timber supply chain management) and one case from the Netherlands (mobile parking). We then illustrate how benefits of mobile technology are contingent to the difficulty of coordinating mobile actors. Next, the value of mobility is contingent to the costs of not being able to coordinate during the period that the actors are difficult to reach. Finally, we assert that it is also related to the costs of available substitutes for mobile technology in a business process.

Identifying and assessing the benefits of mobile technology in a business context is often problematic. In this paper we start from the position that the benefits of mobile technology are hard to quantify in isolation, and that the unit of analysis to identify value should be the business process. An exploratory case study approach is used to identify the benefits of mobile technology at the level of the business process. We describe two cases from Sweden (vehicle dispatching and timber supply chain management) and one case from the Netherlands (mobile parking). We then illustrate how benefits of mobile technology are contingent to the difficulty of coordinating mobile actors. Next, the value of mobility is contingent to the costs of not being able to coordinate during the period that the actors are difficult to reach. Finally, we assert that it is also related to the costs of available substitutes for mobile technology in a business process.

This paper analyzes push-pull initiatives of technological development by studying the concept of Novel Access Provisioning of new wireless Internet access to existing backbone infrastructure. The Novel Access Provisioning project is conducted within the Swedish techno-economic research project with participants from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm School of Economics (SSE) and the Swedish Telecom Agency (PTS). This paper reports on the results from a series of interviews during the fall of 2005 with main representatives from within the Telecom Industry and outside in the Nordic market having an interest in the development and use of mobile services. The aim of the paper is to increase the understanding for why some innovations have a rapid rate of adoption while others are deployed more slowly.