A brief look back
Before we talk about the future, it's always instructive to look at the past. With a little hindsight, it might be possible to draw parallels between personal computers and handheld computing devices. I think that as IT professionals, we can gain some insights into what might transpire with our little digital friends.

Personal computers in the very early eighties weren't originally purchased by organizations the way they are today. A small number of individuals in certain professions like accounting and engineering purchased them, sometimes with their own money, sometimes sneaking them into organizations on their expense accounts or burying their costs within projects. The number of applications available was initially small by today's standards and tended to be general-purpose applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and generic databases. When the co-workers of these early adopters saw the productivity gains that the new devices afforded, they, too, bought computers of their own.

Gradually, organizations saw the benefits of equipping large numbers of their employees with these productivity-enhancing tools and began to supply them to people in certain job roles automatically. The usefulness of the tool increased as the availability of a broad range of software increased. Eventually, more and more people within organizations had computers, and the need to link the individual computers together to share information in and between them increased. Local area networks were created to share resources like disk space and printers and then access and update centralized information in client/server architectures. Total cost of ownership concerns forced increased systems management of the devices to reduce overall operating costs.

Figure A illustrates this brief history of PCs.

FIGURE A

Here's a brief history of PCs. Click picture for a larger image.

I'd like to propose that the adoption of PDAs is following the same general path. Individuals (knowledge workers and professionals) have adopted Palm handhelds and other PDAs for their own individual needs. We're now somewhere between the second and third phases. The availability of applications has gone beyond single-user, general-purpose tools and continues to offer ever more specialized applications for a broader range of uses. Organizations are beginning to see the business benefits of supplying these devices to their employees, provided that the return on investment is warranted.