On the Value of Mobile Business Processes: Evidence from Sweden and the Netherlands

Identifying and assessing the benefits of mobile technology in a business context is often problematic. In this paper we start from the position that the benefits of mobile technology are hard to quantify in isolation, and that the unit of analysis to identify value should be the business process. An exploratory case study approach is used to identify the benefits of mobile technology at the level of the business process. We describe two cases from Sweden (vehicle dispatching and timber supply chain management) and one case from the Netherlands (mobile parking). We then illustrate how benefits of mobile technology are contingent to the difficulty of coordinating mobile actors. Next, the value of mobility is contingent to the costs of not being able to coordinate during the period that the actors are difficult to reach. Finally, we assert that it is also related to the costs of available substitutes for mobile technology in a business process.