In spite of Bechtel’s dramatic cost savings, this kind of wireless deployment won’t work for every company. Stephen Drake, an analyst with research company IDC (a sister company to CIO’s publisher, CXO Media), advises companies to think critically about which applications they want to make available over a wireless network and who’s going to use them. Bechtel Enterprises made three mission-critical applications available to its mobile sales force. Good made sense for Bechtel Enterprises because the organization uses the devices to obtain basic, textual data that’s easy to format for a small screen and that doesn’t take a long time to download over the slow Mobitext network (which is one-tenth the speed of a phone dial-up connection). If Bechtel Enterprises employees were downloading graphic-intensive maps or diagrams, they’d want to reconsider using both handheld devices and a slow network. And if the organization’s users were not salespeople on-the-go but construction workers spending their days underground, they’d probably opt against a pure wireless connection, which would be impossible to access from their subterranean locale, in favor of a cradle solution or some combination of the two.

But for Bechtel’s purposes, the Good products have proven...good. "It’s critical for our people to be able to access information. We’re a global organization. For them to be able to retrieve information without having somebody here in the office get it for them is a big deal for us," says Hernandez.