D11.3: Economic aspects of mobility and identity

Title: INNER-SECTOR COMMUNICATION

Inner-sector communication

The business related sector

Inner-sector communication in this sector contains direct business to business (b2b) communication (type 1:1 communication).  

The market for mobile solutions directed to business to business (b2b) communication is investigated in many studies and market surveys. Solutions in this segment are supporting typical inner- and cross-organisational workflows. Examples of existing or emerging solutions are:

1. Encrypted e-mail access on mobile devices - these solutions currently seem to be one of the most successful mobile solutions on the market.

2. Mobile access to internal enterprise applications (such as customer relationship applications (CRM), enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), business intelligence (BI) and knowledge management solutions, etc.)  

3. Collaboration in projects, data access and exchange (work-grouping) 

4. Solutions for logistics, tracking and tracing (see also)

According to the communicational needs in business processes the type of communication can be one-to-one (1:1) or one-to-many (1: n, broad- or multicast like). Especially in collaborative contexts, 1:n communication is established via e-mailing list or work-grouping solution.  

In general security in this sector is important. The reasons are trade secrets and personal data (compliance to data protection legislation) that are processed. 

The governmental sector

In our understanding, public institutions include government, universities and, following the situation in most European countries, the health sector as well. The communicational relationships can be of the type one-to-one (1:1) and one-to-many (1:n). 

The market for government to government (g2g) mobile solutions currently is restricted, but high-tech oriented and innovative. In this segment mobile solutions are mainly developed for the military, police and rescue forces. This includes applications for communication and command support, situation and case analysis, access to central databases including geographical information systems (GIS), and military logistics. A rarer example is inner-governmental applications for mobile electronic signatures as they are implemented for example in Lithuania.

Following the trend of the business sector, mobile access to strategic governmental applications can be expected in the future. But this might take some time as currently most European governments are introducing non-mobile e-governmental infrastructures and solutions (see for example applications using electronic signatures ).

Typically security for these applications (and naturally the whole systems) is very important as the information is generally confidential, e.g. because of the personal data that are processed (for example in police databases and the medical health system) or their military and police related nature (state secrets). In addition the need for availability and integrity of data is high. 

The private sector

This kind of communication can be mapped to citizen to citizen / customer to customer (both c2c) communication, but the mapping is not accurate. Parts of c2c communication will also be found in cross-sector communication between the private and the public sector. The reason is that the definition of the borders between these sectors seems to be difficult, as obviously a number of services originating or targeting at the private sector aim at a public recognition. The services for which this is obviously the case will be discussed in the following section.  

In addition communication can change its character when proceeding. One typical example is online shopping. The online shop itself is public - anybody can have a look at offers and prices. And having a look at them from the perspective of an individual typically is considered to be a private activity. To achieve this, anonymising services for example can be used. But anonymity typically cannot be kept up when putting goods in the shopping trolley and moving it to the cashier. In this situation today typically personal data is being transferred to facilitate the purchase. The collection of goods in the trolley and the amount and way one pays belong to personal data and are thus subject to data protection. From the perspective of the operator of the online shop, the communication changed its nature from general (1:n) to related to a specific customer (1:1).

In cases of a definite inner-sector communication in the private sector privacy and security becomes an important issue. Typically the communication is of the type one-to-one (1:1), but especially for Location Based Services (LBS) third parties can be involved leading to more complex communicational relationships. 

This communicational context shows a large variety of different applications. Examples are Location Based Services (LBS) to track one’s own child or, more precisely, to track a mobile device.. But simple private mobile communication to one’s spouse belongs to this context as well.