A meeting with a leading North American mobile carrier recently included the inevitable question, “What can we do to boost adoption of mobility in the enterprise?” As a firm tracking mobile data revenues globally for some time (more info here), Yankee Group sees something of a standoff between the appetites of carriers and businesses.

Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile and someone who played a major role in re-thinking corporate software distribution, says, “It’s a service gap. Carriers are oriented around raw bandwidth and minutes, and enterprises need a simple managed service. The two don’t meet.”

What Mort points out is the dearth of enterprise-oriented thinking in mobile data offerings. Businesses need to be able to select their devices, not accept what the carrier chooses to promote. They need to be able to manage that device inventory over a reasonable life cycle, without the carrier obsoleting it six months after they chose it. They need to control the device image without the carrier dictating what apps are and aren’t allowed. And the list goes on.

“As an independent party to the problem, we’ve made some progress in getting at least the GSM carriers to agree on some things the enterprise must have — control of device selection and content, for example. It just takes some good, old-fashioned selling.”

If the enterprise’s potential for mobility gets uncorked, could it help North American consumers, whose addiction to low handset prices and frequent upgrades have locked them into carrier choices on functionality? “It could help the consumer a little. The unlocked device market is growing now, and it could get fuzzier.”

PS: Mort shares my habit of people-watching on his many company visits. “I’ve learned over many years that you can predict a company’s success by observing how people walk around the office, and what they talk about in the lunchroom. Slow walkers and non-work chatter mean a low-energy business. When people are moving fast and work discussions run through the lunch hour, you know they’re on to something.”

The Anywhere Network — ubiquitous, IP-based, highly intelligent — is emerging globally, and Yankee Group believes it will change the way enterprises work. When Anywhere Enterprises can depend on seamless connectivity, what will happen to the highly evolved function of customer care?

A recent visit with Verint produced one interesting answer. I was talking with Nancy Treaster, general manager of the Witness Actionable Solutions division, about the increasing focus in contact centers on optimization. “The technology of the contact center — like the ACD — has led to a management focus on performance metrics. Length of call, resolution, that sort of thing. Firms are beginning to see that workforce measurement and accountability are values that the rest of the organization could rise to using the same technology.”

Follow that chain for a moment. Once an enterprise looks to a contact center to promulgate its workforce optimization solutions to the rest of the organization on an IP platform, then we should anticipate the sharing of work, too, so that back-office teams can finish off data-heavy customer transactions, for instance in processing mortgages or insurance claims.

So what would that mean to an Anywhere Enterprise, one whose workers, assets, and partners could be managed anywhere? I asked if we’d see the dissolving, in effect, of customer care into the entire organization, eroding the silo around a contact center’s highly specialized role. “Interesting idea,” said Nancy. “We could. The contact center was forced to be its own island. But if you can capture fragments of idle time of knowledgeable in-store workers, for example, to answer customer inquiries about products in stock, that could change a lot of things.”

One might be the need for vast resources dedicated to contact centers (”re-shoring”, anyone?!). Organizations could spread the load of customer care around the company more broadly. If you were delivered a customer inquiry that was keyed to your own particular expertise (in my case: the Red Sox’s chances in the postseason; good restaurants in Boston), would you take that call between meetings?

We could all do with the responsibility to talk to our customers more often.

PS: Yankee Group’s Ken Landoline says, “There’s no doubt that the contact center’s boundaries are crumbling rapidly, its functionality bleeding across the enterprise.” (Ooh, sounds painful.) He’s completing research now on ‘presence management,’ touching on non-contact center knowledge workers getting involved with the center’s agents to improve first-contact resolution. He plans to show how presence can be monetized, quantifying the benefits to customer care.