Wireless Enterprise Innovations: Raising Issues Of Temporality And Activities

The overall research question guiding the papers’ studies of mobility-in-use in organizations is: How are different activities of temporality affected when organizations implement and use new wireless solutions in their intraand inter-organizational work and how might these temporality dimensions be linked to each other and its further meaning in an organizational context? The focus on "How"-questions signals an explorative, focus, where the aim is to develop knowledge on how different types of organizations adopt, integrate and use new wireless solutions. Empirically, the entire project that this paper is based on puts focus on 21 different enterprise industries and settings, grouped into eight identified “user environments” in the enterprise market for wireless services. The analyses of the enterprise markets studied have resulted in a set of models and conceptual frameworks, drawing on insights from in-depth case studies of wireless customer organizations, their users and their service providers. The paper discusses the widely and differentially used “mobility” concept. It puts aspects of temporality into the context of wireless enterprise applications and the connected mobility concept. It also elaborates on various conventional/general dimensions of temporality, followed by a discussion of potential effects on these temporal dimensions of wireless enterprise applications. The paper draws on, in a quite pragmatic way, empirical insights from the above described research project on enterprise customers of wireless solutions and the discussion is quite tentative. The paper is concluded with some implications for research and for management.