Failing to take advantage of the 'anywhere' work ethic and enabling mobile access to your business means you are looking to operate at a considerable disadvantage.
The rising comfort with replacing old methods with digital alternatives, coupled with the global economic climate, could see hard times encouraging innovation and technology breakthroughs, predicts MicroStrategy SA country manager, Mark Bannerman.
Bannerman believes recent economic unrests are largely responsible for the burgeoning growth of technology and its entry into the mainstream. The recessions of the 80s led to the adoption of PCs to minimise staffing costs, and the dip during the early 90s meant the client-server model was adopted to strip layers of management out of business processes.
Sales of mobile devices have increased dramatically over recent years, as the tablet craze took off, but signs of trouble have emerged.
Last year's 1.75 billion mobile devices sold were a 1.7% decline from 2011, Gartner reports. Tumultuous consumer preference and intense competition, as well as buyers delaying purchasing new devices because of the rapid pace at which new products were being rolled out, were given as reasons for this instability and decrease in what was originally predicted to be a massive growth industry for 2013.
Truly disruptive technologies force changes to large parts of societies, businesses and economies, said Michael Saylor, CEO and chairman of MicroStrategy and author of "The Mobile Wave". Mobile will be "the catalyst that brings society the most dramatic changes of the information revolution", he writes.
Never before has this been more relevant, as society fast becomes mobile-dominated. While before, letters, memos and newspapers were written on paper, they are now opened on a browser and stored digitally.
"In 2013, enterprise mobility will evolve in the same way that Henry Ford's assembly line did. [It] went from a car every 90 minutes to one every minute," wrote Peter Price, CEO of Webalo, in an article for Forbes.
Ford's breakthrough was scalable, innovative and cost-effective. Enterprise mobility is moving in the same direction, with cumbersome tools and apps falling by the wayside and ceding dominance to fast contemporary solutions that match the user's speed rather than hinder it, argues Price.
As we move away from single terminals and client/server topographies and into the realm of cloudware and virtualisation, mobility and the idea that you can work from anywhere is critical. If you don't keep up, you invite stagnation and the loss of future generations of customers.
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