Today many IT departments are investing in mobile technology to make their internal enterprise content accessible in employees mobile phones and other mobile devices. We all want to be able to work without being at the office, and without having to run around with the job laptop. Imagine being at a business lunch and you want to pull up some presentation you have on the company intranet, why not just use the mobile phone?

In some organizations this is possible, and in some it still isnt’t. And in most organizations you don’t have access to all the documents and content available internally in document management systems, file shares and databases. And even if you did have access to the content in your mobile phone, you wouldn’t want to start browsing for it because it’s just too cumbersome to find it.

Here’s an idea for you: why not utilize the enterprise search platform to make the content both accessible, findable and readable?

First step is to make the content accessible. Since all content is already being indexed by the search engine, it’s already in one central place, at least in text representation. If you have a solution in place for having mobile phones access the company intranet, it should be fairly simple to open up for mobile devices to access the enterprise search web interface as well, with security credentials still in place.

Secondly the content need to be findable, and what better way to find information on a mobile phone is there than to search for it? With mobile search user interface patterns this will be much more efficient than traditional browsing for information.

And third, when you have found your document, you can use search engine features such as fingernail previews, automatic summarization and HTML conversion to make it easily readable on the mobile device.

Check out my presentation on SlideShare on accessing content with mobile search as well.

If you already have an enterprise search platform in place, why not start researching how to utilize it to make your enterprise content accessible on your mobile phone?

And if you don’t have an enterprise search platform in place, I suppose you now have yet another reason to add to your business case for investing in one.