These are tough times for many. Countries are struggling with debt, people get laid off and entire industries are being wiped out. So the news three days ago that Nokia’s profit last quarter slumped by 90% may not come as a particular surprise.

Nokia is suffering from a slump in consumer demand, not alleviated by a parade of new products. These include new handsets (which, some say, look suspiciously like spruced-up versions of some old ones) and Ovi, its new music, maps and more internet portal.

Nor is Nokia suffering alone. Its mobile industry cousins, the operators, have long fretted about becoming merely “dumb pipes,” through which traffic flows but someone else gets the real money (much like you access the internet through your local internet service provider, yet it is Google with its online services who earns billions). New customers, an important engine of revenue growth in the past, are rarer, and ARPUs are stagnating despite a surge of creativity from marketing departments.

Yet, just as countries that were slow to implement structural reform are now painfully discovering, it might not have been that bad. Many of the mobile industry’s real and as yet imaginary woes come from being overwhelmingly exposed to the capricious consumer market. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, the industry’s largest get-together, only one out of nearly 30 sessions was devoted to enterprise solutions.

Mobility and enterprise IT seem to be in denial about each other. IT departments are staffed with people who know, well, IT. The IT industry obliges by providing them with applications that cater to companies’ business processes and with ways to deploy and manage these applications enterprise-wide. It listens to the desires of companies and makes new software in tight integration with them. In other words, IT needs of companies are well understood and catered for.

What of the mobile industry? Innovation even in the consumer market looks sporadic: companies (particularly mobile operators) churn out hundreds of applications and services in the hope that some will stick. Mobile video conferencing was a failure; the fate of music download subscriptions bundled with phones remains to be seen. Apple’s much-touted AppStore brandishes its billionth download just nine months after opening, but look at what downloads are these: a Native American flute simulator, a flight game and an application that imitates an x-ray machine. Small wonder enterprise IT isn’t particularly excited in embracing mobility. Of course, there have been successful enterprise mobility implementations, and employees have welcomed mobile e-mail. But by and large, mobility hasn’t got deep into internal workings of the enterprise.

Opportunities for mobility in the enterprise may be huge. By weaving itself into business processes, the mobile industry will be less exposed to the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t demand from consumers. But the industry should take the task of understanding the needs of the enterprise — and indeed, of individual consumers for that matter — seriously. They should also start making their way into enterprise IT departments. At the moment mobility and enterprise IT look like two distant and overly polite relatives at a big party: both know they are kin, but neither dares to start a conversation without proper introduction.