When you’ve been a technology analyst for as long as I have, you either use or see all the hackneyed phrases that language has to offer.  My personal bugaboo, inherited from a mentor years ago, is the use of the word era to describe a period of just a few years. As in, “the smartphone era.” Dictionaries typically first define era as a geologic term characterizing a massive passing of time – e.g., the Mesozoic Era. I’m sure Apple hopes the iPhone and its offspring will be around for a long time – but it might be stretching things to suggest that long time might span 180 million years.

Mesozoic gastropods outlasted smartphones

Another overused tech industry term is “the Year of X”, where X is any technology that the analyst fervently believes will finally move from proof of concept and early adoption to mass deployment. I personally wrote a report in 1996 talking about the Year of Cable Modems. Which, if I’m being honest, was probably at least a year too soon.

Yet as the saying goes, “I may be paranoid — but someone could still be out to get me.”

Recent data from Yankee Group’s massive monthly surveys of U.S. enterprises — in which we hear from thousands of IT and line-of-business people about their companies’ connectivity activities and intentions — suggest that enterprise IT investment in the coming few years will be characterized by a heavy focus on mobile technologies.

Gee, that’s just not as fun as predicting “the age of enterprise mobility”, is it?

Anyway. Two recent Yankee Group reports, one looking at large enterprises and the second at the small-to-medium-business (SMB) arena, reach similar conclusions. Sheryl Kingstone highlights large enterprise intentions to go mobile in 2010; Steve Hilton shows that SMBs see it the same way. Combining reported priorities for mobile-enabled applications and smartphone deployments, 46% of large enterprises and 50% of SMBs put these at the tops of their investment lists over the next two years.

That’s good news for the enterprises themselves — which stand to reap measurable productivity gains by bringing company data and apps to their workers anywhere they are — and for the associated technology vendors.

(And it might not stop with the mobile devices and systems themselves. In a recent chat with Enterprise Mobile CEO Mort Rosenthal, he suggested that the iPhone may be Apple’s enterprise “starter drug”, causing businesses to progress from accepting Apple’s smartphone to having a more generous attitude about the company’s laptop and desktop computing platforms as well.)

Let’s hope that the caution that has accompanied all tech spending during the downturn follows re-expanding IT budgets in 2010, so that businesses don’t squander the mobile opportunity. The potential pitfalls that lie ahead include carrying existing application silos to the mobile device (versus integrating the experience to deliver the information the worker needs regardless of whatever apps use it on tethered platforms), trying to shoehorn too much functionality into a smaller screen (versus building from use cases that suggest what the worker really needs), and over-constraining the variety of mobile platforms (so that workers can’t use their own mobile devices).

But it can be done. Let the Enterprise Mobility Era begin! Oops — sorry.