Mobility will be more disruptive than social media

Not just a provocative title, mobility will be more disruptive than social media.

We’re really only going through the first phase of this new age now with the rapid spread of smart phones that can consume information in ways beyond the browser (the app as only one example).

I spoke recently with a major pharmaceutical company that has been on the iPhone since it was released in 2007. They were seen as crazy at the time and a significant portion of their workforce was unhappy with the choice.

Today, however, they have over seventy apps that are core to their productivity and give their workforce an edge over the competition. They carry no paper. They carry iPads that train, drive sales calls, warn, alert and otherwise execute strategy. Their mobility platform is how they increase revenue, drive down cost and avoid compliance and other risk. It is as useful in the cubicle as it is on the road. They’re way ahead.

Catching up with this example will be hard. On their journey they had to work through many of the human issues that most companies are just starting to grasp. They had to align management, work functions, process, and policy. It was much more than an IT question.

They aren’t done by any stretch…they are just ahead for now. They will need to answer questions about the host of other possibilities that mobility opens. The challenges include buying or otherwise accessing technology that addresses:

• Context aware search/prompting/recommendation
• Commerce and payments
• Social
• Geo location (Location-based services, or LBS)
• Facial and other object recognition
• Communication (the granddaddy but undergoing change)
• Privacy

We’ll be following up this discussion with thoughts about mobility and Social, PaaS implications, Cloud, process, policy, B2B, organizational structure and the customer view. Enjoy Mobility Week on Successful Workplace.

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Christopher Taylor