Four years ago Google’s Android operating system for mobile devices did not exist in the market. By Q3 this year, according to Nielsen, it surged to 43% market share in the U.S. smartphone arena and another research firm, Canalys, puts Android’s global share at 48%. Conversely, Nokia’s long popular Symbian mobile OS has been steadily losing ground in the mobile market. In the United Kingdom alone Android took nearly 20% of Symbian’s market share, dropping it from 26% to 7% market share in only one year. In the U.S. Symbian registers a minuscule 4% of the market.

I’m not here to praise Android or disparage Symbian. After all, Nokia itself has signaled the end of its venerable OS in favor of using Microsoft Windows Phone as the basis for its future mobile strategy. The company pushed Symbian as far as it could go and it was time to move on. We can only wish them well in their new approach.

My point, rather, is to underscore the acceleration at which new mobile technology is pouring into the market and how it can potentially undermine IT initiatives. If, for example, you were an IT executive who approved a project in 2008 built around Symbian when the OS held more than 50% global market share, you undoubtedly felt reasonably confident that its place in the market would guarantee long-term development from its owner and a robust third-party development ecosystem for years to come. Today, of course, you’d be working on a new mobile strategy.

But I’m suggesting that your new strategy should have as little to do with the handsets as possible. Sure, Apple’s iOS and Android look unassailable as we approach 2012 and, in some minds, are good bets upon which to build mobile enterprise applications. However, just as Android came out of nowhere to eclipse Symbian and even iOS in market share, it, too, can be readily bypassed with any of a number of mobile operating systems waiting in the wings.

Intel and Samsung, for example, are throwing their weight behind Tizen, an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation, that will start showing up on devices next year. And let’s not forget Windows Phone. Some analysts believe it will rebound and take the number two market share spot behind Android by 2013. Let’s face it: building a mobile strategy around the flavor of the year handset OS is a losing proposition. You will never keep up.

The best long-term approach to mobility for business is not in the hands of your mobile workers. It’s inside the data center. IT needs to develop its mobile applications around a platform that is indifferent to the latest hot gadget, one that leverages mobile handset features, but also retains the stability of an architecture that sees a mobile unit as the presentation layer, not the foundation for enterprise mobility.