Many of us can't live without our cell phones or personal digital assistants (PDAs). These small devices have become an extension of ourselves — clipped to our belts or stashed in a purse — and have become our personal connections to the rest of the world. So dependent upon these gadgets are we that we feel lost without them.

The same can be said for the laptop computer, a travel companion we stow away in a briefcase to act as our work platform while we are out of the office. There's no such thing as individual downtime. Documents can be reviewed, reports can be written, and e-mails can be read while we are on planes, trains, or in hotels.

Because of the convenience of being able to communicate wherever and whenever we want, wireless devices have become integral to our personal and work lives, providing an important tool not only in the enterprise, but also in the factory, the field, and the warehouse. Today, plant managers can be alerted to a problem in production via a digital feed to their PDAs; service technicians can be guided to an off-site service call using a GPS system in the truck; and warehouse workers can track inventory by means of radio frequency identification (RFID).

It is an increasingly wireless world we live in, but this untethered world is anything but homogeneous, uniform, or seamless. It is, instead, a mixed bag of technologies — cellular towers, satellite, WiFi, WiMAX, wireless Ethernet, sensor-based networks, and multiple bands of radio waves — that supports a wide variety of early applications in asset management, location tracking, and remote diagnosis of equipment, to name a few.

The problem is that wireless has emerged in a slapdash sort of way, unsystematically placed in areas of the organization where only individual groups can benefit. However, as manufacturers try to drive as much efficiency into the enterprise as possible, they have the unenviable task of having to manage this mishmash of technological approaches. And it is not just the wireless infrastructure, but the devices as well — Blackberries in the sales force; Nextel walkie-talkies in the warehouse; RFID tags in the supply chain; Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM laptops in the field; and rugged Motorola mobile computers in the factory.

These mobile devices are designed for specific wireless networks that use various standards and communications protocols, adding another layer of complexity for IT departments responsible for supporting them. As a result of the wireless overload on IT departments, users of the devices often take control of application development and maintenance, leading to tactical deployments that don't take into consideration overarching business processes. Ultimately, observers say, this is limiting wireless technology's ability to play a strategic role in the enterprise.

"One of the problems with the mobile office is it has evolved in chaos," says Randy Mears, a member of the EDS Fellows program. To truly benefit from all that the untethered infrastructure has to offer, IT organizations must find a way to centrally manage it, providing the appearance of a unified wireless landscape, he says.

Wireless is evolving much like PCs did, Mears says, when departments bought their own computers and solved their own problems because they didn't want to wait for IT departments bogged down with mainframe maintenance chores. IT departments eventually gained control over PCs, promulgating corporate standards around type and brand allowed on the corporate network and centrally managing assets. The same will happen with wireless networks and mobile devices, Mears believes.

The days of the wild, wild West in wireless are far from over, but there have been developments that promise greater order. Wireless technology suppliers are responding with new, multifunctional devices that integrate various capabilities. Motorola's MC9000, for example, can read both RFID tags and bar codes, and Research In Motion's new Blackberry 8820 includes WiFi access in addition to cellular. While these devices may ease the cost of ownership by not requiring users to purchase separate devices for every application, or by leveraging the free corporate WiFi network versus paying for minutes on a cellular network, the real mechanism that will move the mobile enterprise forward is the ability to tie disparate wireless networks together.

To that end, the next big thing in wireless is the creation of a connected infrastructure.