Seven years ago, I formed the Internet business group of what was then Digital Equipment Corp. I reached an informal agreement to merge our nascent search-engine technology, AltaVista, with the then-obscure entity Yahoo! Inc. (www.yahoo.com) which provided complementary surfing and chat capabilities. The concept, then and now, is simple: that technology will catch on only once it becomes compellingly useful. Yahoo seemed to me to provide an important element of usability, but senior management couldn’t see what I saw. I was told to stay away from Yahoo. Then I was demoted two levels.

DEC, of course, has since disappeared, and AltaVista has languished, while Yahoo has flourished.

I’m hoping my immodest tale will demonstrate that I have a pretty good nose for technology trends. And the scars to prove it.

My battered nose tells me that senior managers are misunderstanding "mobile commerce" in ways just as important as those that confused DEC’s executives. Many have said that the movement toward "mobility"—the ability to purchase items, gather information, and communicate via cellphones, personal digital assistants, and an array of other wireless devices—is in the same place as the World Wide Web was when it caught the world’s imagination in 1995. Not so.

Although the mobility and Web movements should eventually be comparable in sweep and power, there are three major differences between then and now:

The biggest is that the mobility movement is operating without, well, a Net. The Web was built on top of the Internet, which in 1995 was a reasonably robust network of computer networks that was more than 25 years old. By contrast, mobility technology is far less mature. There is such potential for innovation that it’s not possible to know just what sorts of devices people will use to connect to the wireless network. Even with cellphones, which have been around for years, worldwide standards for the technology still don’t exist. The network itself is still being built out, and the technology is in flux.

As makers of phones equipped with Web browsers demonstrated painfully over the past year, any company that thinks it can take an idea from the Web and just plop it onto a wireless device is going to drop right through the gaps in mobile technology.

This time, the technology won’t necessarily be made in America. Europe and Japan are clearly ahead in both technology and in consumer adoption of it.

This suggests that North American businesses can learn something from early overseas mobile strategies. A case in point was the decision made by Broadwing Inc. (www.broadwing.com) to introduce its wildly popular prepaid i-wireless phones in the U.S. after it saw how European kids loved similar phones (and ran up big bills).

Companies that are lagging behind in their understanding of mobile technology may be even further behind than e-commerce laggards were in 1995. Although mobile technology is young, it is going to mature in a hurry. Today, an estimated six million people are toting around mobile phones in the U.S. But research firm IDC (www.idc.com) estimates that there will be 484 million mobile Web users worldwide by 2005. In other words, almost half a billion people are expected to be using some kind of wireless device to find information, to communicate, or to conduct business on the Internet.

With so much technology change likely in these next four years, the learning curve will look like an elevator shaft.

In light of these three differences, I embarked on a major study that sheds light on how executives should prepare their businesses for the prospect that business partners and customers will soon be able to interact with them from any device, anywhere, anytime. I studied and interviewed executives at more than 1,500 companies that will tackle the Herculean tasks of inventing mobile technologies, building them into vast networks, and providing services to mobile users.

I found that executives should be doing five things:

Conduct an audit to find how many mobile workers you have. The number may be greater than you think. Research firm Yankee Group (www.yankeegroup.com) reports that more than 50% of America’s 141 million workers spend almost half their time away from their primary workplace.

If you have enough workers operating outside your offices, you should immediately provide them wireless access at least to e-mail, employee directories, and a corporate intranet. Doing so is relatively easy because of a growing number of software packages that handle the tasks.

Map out what on-the-move employees will want to do wirelessly in the intermediate term and start to lay the groundwork. For instance, many mobile devices may be used to enhance service by giving information or instruction to those visiting customers. The devices could also supply executives with up-to-the-moment data. Ford Motor Co. (www.ford.com) has already arranged to give its on-the-go executives mobile access to information on suppliers and financial results. Ford has also created wireless channels to automatically distribute key information to executives.

In thinking about customers, don’t focus first on transacting business with them. Instead, look first for ways to provide them important information—not necessarily to generate revenue but just to serve them better.

Fidelity Investments (www300.fidelity.com) considers wireless a must to remain competitive in online brokerage. The company’s InstantBroker offers clients mobile access to stock quotes, portfolios, watch lists, and e-mail alerts of changing stock prices, as well as the ability to complete stock transactions. Some 70% of InstantBroker clients are existing Fidelity customers, suggesting that wireless will be critical to customer retention.

Start imagining pie-in-the-sky possibilities that could redefine your relations with customers—for instance, wearable devices for medical teams that link them wirelessly to experts around the world.

Although most of these ideas won’t come to fruition for years, it helps to be working toward a compelling vision of the future.

Play with technology. That’s the only way you’ll know when a technology is robust enough to rely on.

There are dozens of potentially important technologies that need to be tracked—for instance, those related to voice recognition, security, data transmission, "always-on" connections to the network, and dynamic provisioning, which allows new features to be sent to all users automatically.

By playing with technology, I think I’ve even discovered the mobile Web’s next potential Yahoo: Webmap Technologies Inc. (www.webmap.com), a privately held company that has a search system activated by a touch-screen stylus. It appears to tunnel through the Web to seek out requested information. "Tap, tap" may replace "point and click."

My advice to them is the same that I gave to DEC and am giving to you: Get in on the ground floor.

Forbes is one of the pioneers in applying the Web to business and is co-creator of AltaVista. She can be reached at sheridanforbes@yahoo.com.