Ralph Szygenda, CIO of General Motors, said that successful companies have the right information available to them for making ‘on-the-spot’ decisions around the world and ’round the clock.

Global businesses today operate 24×7. At any given time, decisions are being made that will impact someone’s operations somewhere in the world.

When you order a PC from Dell from your home in Sydney, you are triggering a build process either in China or Malaysia. You are also indirectly putting Dell suppliers on alert as to what components they will need to restock for the PC vendor. Dell’s logistics partner will also be notified when to collect the PC from the warehouse, its shipping route and when you expect it to arrive at your doorsteps.

There is tremendous pressure on businesses to move faster than is traditionally possible. Anticipating what the market wants is expensive. Reacting to changes in the business can be slow, cumbersome and you risk losing potential revenue that might otherwise be gained from having first mover advantage.

Regardless of what your role is in your business, having information on-the-spot or at the point of need is crucial to the execution of your job. It has direct impact on the profitability of a company. A number of vendors like Motorola, Intermec and RIM are delivering solutions to empower staff to collect and make decisions on-the-spot.

Mike Muller, Head of Asia Pacific for Motorola’s Enterprise Mobility business (formerly Symbol), says that its about making sure that persons doing the job, on the spot, have got the right information, the right application and the right infrastructure to make the right decision. “It’s really around getting the information from the point of work, into a central point, and then getting information back out again into the point of decision. And it’s really around compressing the time for all of that to happen,” adds Muller.

The solution is borderless, industry-transparent, and like the Internet, it works 24×7x365. Muller cites the example of an airplane sitting on an airport tarmac.

If there’s a 747 sitting on the ground in an airport that needs maintenance, the airline is losing money for as long as it’s on the ground. They want maintenance work on it immediately, the real-time information around parts availability, access to online manuals, and everything they need to be able to get that plane up and going again as quickly as possible. “That’s really the promise, and also what enterprise mobility is delivering today. It’s really about compressing the decision time, making sure that wherever you are, you’ve got the data, you’ve got the application, and you can do the work,” says Muller.

Beyond the product literatures and the explanation of well-meaning sales executives, the challenge for many businesses today is to integrate mobile solutions into existing applications that may not have been designed to support such technologies.

The desire to bring in the benefits of mobile technology into the enterprise comes with a number of challenges. Security is top of mind among businesses and operations managers concerned about data theft.

There are lots of documented stories about confidential information being leaked out or stolen. But in many cases, the device from where theft or loss occurred was one that was not sanctioned by the enterprise.

“In one example, the information was an Excel spreadsheet stored on a SD memory card loaded onto a personal digital assistant (PDA). Without a companywide policy on how information is stored and accessed, the CIO will never know what devices employees are using and, more importantly, what information is being stored in these devices,” adds Muller.

Technology is now available where you can remotely manage mobile devices out in the field. You can lock the device the moment it leaves a designated area. You can even trigger a disable code that literally makes the device into a brick.

After you’ve passed the security concerns, the next challenge is identifying the right solutions and making sure the integration is seamless.

After security, cost is the next factor that determines the solution that gets deployed. There are two types of cost most executives need to