A Holistic Conceptual Framework

Abstract

Location technology can be applied in many situations of daily life and is impacting many areas of business. The ability of business to deliver meaningful services to mobile users is greatly increased by knowing the location and context of the user, and the technology is reaching the point where these possibilities can be turned into practical solutions. The technology has required vastly complex efforts in standards and development issues to get to where it is today. Customers and consumers are evolving with the technological environment too and are becoming ever more demanding. However, the next phases of customer satisfaction are seen to be in need of values other than only the attributes of something that can be purchased, the need is for higher lifetime values. By means of a literature review, this research attempts to find a framework enabling the support of such values specifically through mobile location services, focusing on the business-consumer domain. The technology is difficult to handle, business processes required for such enablement are missing, and social processes to incorporate a technology increasing in daily use, aimed at higher values, have not yet coalesced. The research attempts to fill this gap. The literature review finds that a holistic view incorporating regulation, societal and consumer inputs together with the business model concept viewed by industry and firms, is required to produce the conceptual framework. Mobile related technological change causes fundamental economic impacts on the market, consumers and individual behaviour, the addition of location technologies could cause paradigmatic change to the present system of economic and social activity. The system continues to evolve also providing for the evolutionary needs of individuals