If you’re like most companies, you have devoted at least a bit of time to considering whether or not you should dive into the world of mobility. The evidence is all around us that mobile devices aren’t just a fad, nor are the apps or mobile websites where many of us spend our time.

Before diving too deep, make sure you’re taking the proper steps to develop a cohesive, comprehensive mobile strategy. This will undoubtedly save your organization time and money trying to reign in rogue efforts in the future.

I recently read an article that indicated that it doesn't matter to consumers whether mobile apps prevail over the mobile web. It was right there in the title. To the title's credit, it certainly caught my attention. But in a sound-bite-driven, 140-characters-or-less world, too many people won't take the time to read the rest of the article or add some balance to the discussion.

While it's true that average consumers may not be able to articulate or identify the differences between a mobile app and the mobile web, they are masters at identifying good experiences with technology. And, if for no other reason than that, mobile app vs. mobile web does indeed matter.

It's a crime that it's already March and this is our first blog post of the new year! But we're back after months of working on some exciting developments. 

We've done a soft release of our Urban Suite product and are now ready to move to the next step with our beta program and identifying some pilot sites. Urban Suite provides a solution for capturing project expenses in the field, and is ideally suited for general contractors, sub-contractors, and the like. We combine the convenience of a mobile app with the power of the cloud to save administrative time, reduce errors in billing, improve ROI, and shorten cycle time for job completion. Any of that sound interesting to you??

It all sounded so simple…users would take pictures with their Apple mobile devices, and then could select those pictures from the gallery to assign to one or more projects within our Urban Suite application. The selection and association wasn’t a problem, but getting the correct geo-location data to come along for the ride sure was.

If you're a small to medium sized company, searching for technology solutions to help manage or grow your business, then you have undoubtedly read about 'The Cloud'. You may even have learned about some of the basics from an article we wrote a little over a year ago. The basic premise of the cloud is a simple one - rather than running your business software on an internal network, it is stored, maintained, and accessed from the internet. Another good source for a clear explanation of the cloud is available from Salesforce.com on YouTube.

Web-based or cloud-based consumer solutions were adopted more quickly and easily than business solutions. For example, people don't resist backing up files on-line with providers like Mozy that offer an annual service competitively priced according to the amount of data needing to be stored. Still others are comfortable using Google Docs for the creation, storage, and modification of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more. 

My high school physics teacher was an unforgettable character. A tall, gangly, ex-military man, his enthusiasm for the topic was contagious. As we learned techniques for solving equations or committed key information to memory (like Avogadro’s number) he would ceremoniously announce that we should put these things in our Bag of Tricks for later use. Over the course of the year, I came to believe I actually owned a Bag of Tricks and could manage its contents as I saw fit.

Many years later, Avogadro’s number has found its way to the bottom of my bag, because I’ve spent the intervening years filling my Bag of Tricks with lessons learned for managing projects successfully. Here are 3 of my favorites:

Another year of Speed Week has come and gone and it was great fun as always. This year was special though because it was the inaugural year of Quickstone Racing running with their gas roadster. Everyday was an adventure, with the first day requiring a technical inspection of the car. The SCTA (Southern California Timing Association) and BNI (Bonneville Nationals, Inc.), the sponsors of Speed Week, publish a new rule book each year that's loaded with the requirements for qualifying a car in a particular class, licensing a driver, and ensuring safety.

I came across a tweet the other day that said today’s developers need to know 10,000 different things, requiring a gigantic mind map. I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t find the tweet anymore to give proper credit. I just breezed by it, and it was only later that I realized how much it was sticking in my mind.

This seemed to ring true for me as it seems to be more and more difficult to find someone who can develop an application start-to- finish without needing to call in the troops. Developers used to identify themselves by the language they knew – “I’m a C++ developer.” “I’m a PHP developer.” It didn’t mean they didn’t know or have exposure to other languages, but the single descriptor was meaningful, marketable, and told a story much bigger than the mere words.

Just when you thought the world had reached its natural limit of technology acronyms, the emergence of mobility in the enterprise brings with it a new one - MEAPs.

MEAPs, mobile enterprise application platforms, generally provide an environment for managing and deploying mobile applications across multiple devices with varying operating systems. For example, if your organization has a mobile app that you want to deploy on the iPhone and iPad as well as Windows Phone 7, Android, or BlackBerry, then you have an immediate complication in order to deploy and support the application. A quality MEAP can help you overcome these hurdles.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of work in Italy lately, and it’s gotten me thinking about ERP project communication and the inherent challenges that continue to get downplayed or ignored, even in the face of avoidable failure. My Italian is marginal at best. As with the adoption of most new languages, I’ve got a few colors, numbers, and polite words under my belt, along with a grocery list of yummy foods. This vocabulary doesn’t go very far in a work situation.