Australian Case Studies in Mobile Commerce

Sixteen wireless case studies highlight issues relating to mobile commerce in Australia. The issues include: the need for a clear business case; difficulty of achieving critical mass and acceptance of a new service; training and technical issues, as well as staff acceptance issues; that privacy and security issues arise through the potential to track the location of people and through the amounts of personal data collected; difficulties in integrating with existing back-end systems; projects being affected by changes to legislation, or requiring changes to the law; and that while there is potential for mobile phone operators to develop new billing methods that become new models for issuing credit, they are not covered by existing credit laws. We have placed the case studies in a Fit-Viability framework and analyzed the issues according to key success criteria. While many organizations are keen to use the technology, they are struggling to find a compelling business case for adoption and that without a strong business case projects are unlikely to progress past the pilot stage.