Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

As often mentioned in my previous posts, SMS provides an excellent, low cost communications method where one or both parties are on the move or away from the office.  It can be used in a number of business scenarios and one area I was recently asked to look at for BT was field force automation. Many businesses, large or small, have employees who need to work, at least some of the time,, out in the field.  Social workers, nurses, GPs, builders, plumbers, insurance claims inspectors, security guards, electricians and so on all spend large amounts of their working day away from headquarters.  Communicating with these key workers when they're away from the desk or workshop can be crucial to the effective running of the business.  Also, increasingly, keeping in touch is crucial for their safety, especially those who make site or home visits alone. So why is SMS so perfect for communicating with these people.  Simple.  It's cheap, easy to set up and reliable....

Interesting bit of news I found on the Internet...  Android phones have outsold the iPhone in the US for the first time, in Q4 2010.   Apparently, according to the survey, Apple sold 24.3% of the 63.2m smartphones sold, Google Android counted for 28.7%.  RIM's share for its Blackberry device dropped to almost 7 percentage points to 31.6% but it is still market leader in the US. As both Google and Apple shares continue to rise, it looks like Blackberry could soon slip back into third place so expect some form of competitive reaction from RIM in the form of offers and price reductions.   Google have targeted a much broader segment of the market, whereas Apple is more focused on the mid- to high-end of the market, so it is to be expected that Google is growing more quickly.  Google is more widely distributed also, whereas Apple like to keep a strong hand on where and how (and dare I say at what price) the iPhone is sold.   What will be intere...