Wireless technology has improved during the past few years but stillhas a ways to go before it catches up to the original hype, saysVictor Milligan, vice president of consulting for Stamford,Conn.-based Gartner. "The only way to make sense of it is to build abusiness case," says Milligan. "If you have a mobile workforce that ispart of a mission-critical or valuable business process, you need tohave a wireless strategy. That strategy may be to defer, but at leastyou're making the decision based on information."

Building a business case is not as simple as it may first appear. ManyCIOs still have a hard time determining a hard ROI for wirelessprojects. In CIO's latest survey, the two most popular measures of ROIwere increased productivity (54 percent) and improved internalcustomer satisfaction (40 percent), neither of which is easilymeasured. Furthermore, an astounding 25 percent of CIOs surveyed saidthat they didn't measure the ROI of wireless projects atall.

That's not good.

Although the executives interviewed for this article say they will nolonger pay for projects that won't pay them back, few are able todefine that payback in anything more than general terms. Still, bestpractices for planning, launching and implementing wireless projectscan be derived by examining projects that work and those that don't.And what works are projects that start with a clearly stated problemand proceed by deploying the most direct solutionleveraging the righttechnology. CIOs who have led those successful implementations areable to track how they increase revenue and how they reducecosts.

"Who's Got the Doohickey That Fits into theThingamabob?"