Field Mobility 2013: How The Latest Technologies And Trends Are Transforming The Mobile Workforce

By Field Technologies magazine

In case you haven’t seen previous editions of this annual report, let me briefly explain its purpose. I often get feedback from readers like you that some of the most beneficial information available is insight into what real-world peers are doing — which devices they’re selecting and why, what software solutions they’re finding the most value in, how they’re handling their implementations, and so on. This report is based on findings from an annual survey designed to provide just that information. This year we had more than 630 respondents to the survey, and their feedback is compiled in this report. The following pages explore which technologies our readers are using and plan to use in the future, as well as what features and functionality they see as most important in each category. This year’s report also includes respondents’ thoughts on some of the biggest trends in mobility today.

In addition to gathering their views on the technologies and trends, we also asked the respondents to share with us some anecdotes on mistakes they’ve made when selecting or deploying mobile technologies with the hope that you can learn from their words of wisdom instead of making those same mistakes yourselves. You’ll see their advice sprinkled throughout this report as it relates to a specific technology or topic, but the respondents also had some general feedback I thought I’d share with you here. Despite the fact that some of you might look at this advice and think it’s obvious, these anecdotes are from October of 2012 — which goes to show that companies are still making these (seemingly glaring) mistakes when deploying mobility. If you haven’t come across these issues before, this is good advice to heed. If you’ve covered these points before, consider this a refresher course.