Mobile phones, BlackBerries and other wireless gadgets sort of sneaked up on most businesses.
Years ago employees started buying mobile phones, making calls and writing off their expenses each month in the same way they charge off business luncheons and mileage.
Many companies now spend more each month on wireless than on traditional phones.
If a company could consolidate its wireless purchases, take bids and get hefty discounts, it would save bags of money, but most companies find it difficult to do so, said Nick Wray, a senior vice president at Control Point Solutions Inc., a firm that counsels enterprises about communications.
“Historically, cellular service in the United States has been very fragmented,” Wray said.
“Most companies cannot dictate a single provider for employees to use because of service issues,” he said.
That is, if your company says you have to use a particular carrier but you cannot get a signal in your home, you’re going to push back. Another barrier to change is the contracts employees have with wireless carriers that impose large penalties if a customer changes carriers before the contract expires.
The problem was discussed this week at the Mobile Business Expo, a trade show held at Navy Pier.
The barriers to change are high, and at most companies there is no single person or department that stands to benefit from making a change. Hence, no one is pushing to do anything differently, said Darren Lancaster, an executive with the enterprise solutions unit of Nokia Inc., the world’s largest mobile phone-maker.
“What’s going to drive change?” said Lancaster. “The big applications for the enterprise are voice and e-mail.”
Nokia wants office voice and e-mail service to be available over wireless phones as well as at the office desktop, which gives mobile workers a productivity advantage when they travel.
While most wireless phones are designed with the consumer in mind, Nokia is introducing models intended specifically for business users, Lancaster said. Combined with software applied to a company’s private exchange equipment, this enables an employee to get and make calls from his mobile phone using his office phone number.
Other Nokia software enables employees to get and receive e-mail from their office computer on a mobile phone.
These applications work with any carrier, so long as the carrier offers a data service.
“We want to remove the barriers so that all employees can try using wireless,” said Lancaster. “Some will just dabble with it, but others will become power users.”
Fight against cancer shrinks: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is working with colleagues in St. Louis to apply nanotechnology to the treatment of cancer.
The goal of the project, which includes the Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes-Jewish Hospital, is to use particles that are billionths of a meter to detect and treat cancer. The National Cancer Institute has awarded a five-year, $16 million grant to establish a nano-cancer research center.
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A similar center was established by the cancer institute at Northwestern University, and five other centers were established outside the Midwest.
“We’ve entered an era of precisely targeted and individualized cancer therapy,” said Dr. Samuel Wickline of Barnes-Jewish Hospital, who will head the center. “Our nanotechnology will strongly affect the practice of medicine.”
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