Tempted by the Mobility Gold rush: Avoid the sensationalism, be “sense”able!

By now, probably every one of the business leaders and their aunts have already heard enough about Mobility and how it is going to change our businesses, lives, et al… I can already hear fatigue setting in. Those who have been around a bit longer will have skeptically heard the pitches from inhouse geeks / highly paid consultants / technology evangelists about the game- changing- gizmo’s available now and how the business paradigm has shifted.

If you have drunk the kool aid and already know how your business will benefit from this mobility gold rush, need not read any further.

For the rest of us, especially those who see how this is different but still scratching their heads about what it means for their day to day business, where their business benefits lie and indeed, where they can start off to grab the low hanging fruits… you know why you are still reading J

As someone who has spent more than a decade helping organizations setup business processes around technology platforms, I was honestly less –than-impressed till recently about the whole Mobility gold rush. So, the geeks have a new technology and churning out buzz words (BYOD, MDM et al) to sound smarter on their twitter accounts, right?

Well, having been off the mark about viability of other technology waves (google is just another search engine! facebook is valued at what? Social is for kids, not businesses), this time reaching for the humble pie before writing off the Mobility Kool aid maybe more fulfilling.

So quest for getting what is this Enterprise Mobility and more specifically, what can it do for my business begins. Lets take a look at this one step at a time. Of course, mobile or not, the business senses have stayed the same :

What has evolved substantially over the years has been the way businesses have tried to connect with individuals. Call it B2B/ B2C/ B2E/ B2G or whatever, the pace of evolution on individuals side has outpaced that of the business side. Lot of it was accelerated by sheer innovation from Apple Inc, who were just disrupting the individual technology landscape as an annual KPI. Increasingly, these devices were catering, even extending the capabilities of 5 basic human senses.

As we speak today, we are able to touch, talk, see, listen thru these devices. iPhone was the first device which probably stepped into intuitively figure out what a user wants, thus expanding into catering to the sixth human sense, ie, intuition . Recently, Google’s Android has also developed capability to intuitively suggest to users things they may wish.

Over a period, the chasm between Business technology and how it connected with individual tech became so wide that something like an arab spring was on cards if that gap was unfulfilled.

Final straw in this Business to Individual gap (lets just call it B2i gap, encompassing all of B2B/ B2C/ B2E) was around 2010, when Apple launched the iPad. Since then the autocratic business organizations realized that to avoid an arab spring of revolt, they will need to support individuality.

By then, not only devices but also UI, way of interaction, collaboration message exchanges and overall experience had gone thru a paradigm shift. From Transaction based systems to interaction oriented experience.

So, what’s next? Technology evolution is kind of risky field to do crystal ball gazing, but we suggest that as long as businesses take a “sense” able approach we all should be on safe ground.

Connect the dots of business drivers / senses with the those on “i” side and ask yourself these basic questions:

• What is the quantified benefit for my business with Mobility adoption (specify revenue accretion / cost reduction)?
• What will it cost me over short term (low hanging fruits), medium term and long term?
• What are the risks in such a fast paced evolutionary market (anyone remember Nokia/ RIM) and how they will be mitigated.