By Richard Echeandia
If a single PalmPilot is good, then more PalmPilots must be better, right? In a move somewhat reminiscent of personal computer adoption in the early 80's, Personal Digital Assistants (or PDAs) are being purchased by individuals on their credit cards and then being expensed back into the company on a rapidly increasing basis. This pattern is being greeted with emotions ranging from resignation to alarm by the Information Systems (IS) departments of most organizations. In this article I'd like to briefly touch on some of the reasons for this resistance, discuss how IS departments can have this trend work in their favor and talk about how to incorporate PDAs into various aspects of your company's operations.
PalmPilots are hot - there can be no doubt about that. With a market share close to twice that of all its competitors combined, they are seen everywhere. But as pervasive as they are becoming, their utilization is still largely based on individual use, again like the experience of PCs in the 1980's. In the increasingly connected 90's, isolation is the exception rather then the rule.
Enterprise Digital Assistants (EDAs) are small convenient hand-held devices used by employees to perform personal and business functions for which laptops or desktop PCs are not ideally suited. Some of the common applications which are coming into prominence include remote data collection in the insurance and medical industries, inventory spot-checking and remote email monitoring.
These applications are just beginning to come into use. In my opinion, the next 12 months will see a rapid increase in the scale and type of applications for which businesses use PalmPilots.
PalmPilots as employee incentives
Can you use PDAs as incentives for your employees? I'll outline what some companies are doing below.
Our firm, like most others in the IS field, wants to keep its employee's skills up to date and competitive. One of the ways to do that is to have employees become certified by the vendors of important technologies. At Tactica we reward employees for becoming certified by giving them a PalmPilot once they've earned their certification. We feel that this gives them a tool for work as well as something to assist them personally.
Although our organization is comparatively small (less than 30 people), we've seen almost one quarter of the employees take advantage of our PalmPilot offer and elect to study for certification on their own time. When compared to the cost of formal technical training which can sometimes cost eight or nine hundred dollars a day, the cost of a PalmPilot is a bargain.
