Hype Busting: Wireless, Speech Recognition, E-Marketplaces, CRM, The Web

CIO — Hard work used to be the remedy for all business ills. Sales down? Make more calls. Take more trips. Shake more hands. Costs rising? Squeeze your suppliers. Cut out the deadwood. Trim the expense accounts.

Today technology is offered as the magic pill. Sales down? Buy more laptops. Build a database. Install customer relationship management (CRM) software. Integrate wireless applications. Costs rising? Join an e-marketplace. Outsource to an application service provider. Sales off? Spiff up your website.

But technology doesn’t always work as advertised. To help quiet the hype, CIO has put together its latest round of Five Uneasy Pieces. These takes offer a more skeptical perspective on a quintet of the hottest tech trends: e-marketplaces, speech recognition, wireless technology, CRM software and even the Web itself. You may not agree with everything our authors have to say, but hopefully their words will help evict some of the hype that’s cluttering your brainpan.

Wireless Technologies

The Trendline
Don’t bother telling your users about the wonders of wireless technologies. Let them tell you. Hear them describe the joys of information independence—the exhilarating freedom of being able to access any information anywhere through the modem-free miracle of PDAs, pagers and cell phones. And then don’t even think about telling these users that IS can’t support their wireless devices. That’s no longer an option.

The Promise
Wireless technologies guarantee that no conscientious worker will ever escape work completely. Not with cell phones that let conference calls carry over into the commute, not with pagers and PDAs that keep e-mail and Web access within arm’s reach. User resistance? Forget it! Meta Group says that by 2003, half of all businesspeople will use three to four wireless data devices. Gartner Group predicts that by 2005, wireless technologies will attract 1 billion users worldwide. "The heartbeat of the business enterprise has become ’how quickly can you get back to a client’s e-mail or voice mail?’" says Gartner Senior Analyst Phillip Redman. "And that heartbeat is only going to get faster."

The Pitfalls
There are several good reasons to doubt whether wireless can attain quick ubiquity, despite its steep growth curve:

Health Concerns Is there really a link between cell phone use and cancer? It’s an issue being decided not just by the medical community, but in the courts as well. A Maryland doctor recently filed an $800 million lawsuit against Motorola and eight other telecommunications companies and groups, charging that his cell phone use caused a malignant brain tumor. Suits such as this one could put a lot of corporate wireless strategies on hold until the issues are settled.

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