A true story: We ran a trial of our Mobile Enterprise Platform where we supported a single set of duties on a client site. The 'buyer' was the Director responsible for those end user duties and IT's involvement was simply to put infrastruture where we advised. Similarly, Finance barely touched the project as our client was so confident that if the trial was a success then he would appreciate the benefits of mobile computing in every dimension and share our long term vision of this platform gradually deploying support for other duties.

In reality, the day of reckoning came to negotiate the 3 to 5 year deal and finance were shocked at the expense. They were measuring ROI of infrastructure on the first year and looking at the marginal benefit of productivity savings on this single deployment. Very frustrating.

Oh, how I wish we had pushed to share the vision over that 12 months so we could be on a par with the business case for desktop computing when common platforms and ubiquitous networking took over from dedicated greenscreens.

Richard