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How Mobile is Rapidly Evolving the World

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The first time I can remember realizing how critical mobile phones were to people was back in 2006, while I was working in India. It was a blistering summer, and I’d heard the news that rural farmers were waiting in mile long lines to bring their produce to market; most had to spend the night catching what sleep they could on their bullock carts. Sadly, the heat of the summer spoiled nearly all the produce that didn’t make it to market that week, and many farmers were distraught.

A few farmers, I later learned, used their mobile phones to find out about prices and wait times at different markets. Armed with that information, they sold their produce in the markets that had the shortest lines and highest prices. They had, in fact, saved their produce and their financial livelihood from certain ruin.

Situations like this one highlight crucial progress occurring in some of the most remote places on earth. Where people living in the most disadvantaged societies are utilizing 21st century mobile technologies to help solve problems that have been around since the 19th century – a period of 200 years bridged by a single device carried in your pocket.

So if mobile technologies are evolving the least advanced societies, imagine what they’re going to do the world’s most advanced.

Mobile Business: Evolution or Intelligent Design?

There's no other technology in the world that 87% of the world’s population owns. And yet, despite mobile devices’ ubiquity and connectivity, we are only beginning to realize what’s possible. But most organizations, in fact most people, aren’t ready for the massive cultural, health, business and government impacts that these mobile devices are about to deliver.

I believe mobile technologies will displace many of the fixed-location technologies that keep people and businesses chained to physical places. Who needs a store when you can point, click and buy a product from Amazon.com? Indeed, who needs to visit a bank branch when you can transfer money anywhere using services like Paypal or Square?

According to Price Waterhouse Coopers’ latest Digital IQ survey, 66% of organizations are investing in mobile technologies for their employees. But these businesses are reacting to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon, most are not preparing for it.

The smarter organizations are quickly adapting mobile technologies to their businesses by designing for mobile as an integral part of their future workplace, Andrew Dixon, Vice President of Marketing & Operations, IGLOO Software characterizes the future workplace as: “The blurring between work life and home life, the emergence of new mobile platforms, the shifting expectations of IT and the rise of social as a transformative force in collaboration... The future workplace is actually not a place. It’s just what you do. That means business will happen wherever, whenever and on whatever device it needs to happen – 24/7.”

If you subscribe to Dixon’s view as I do, you can anticipate that work as we know it will change dramatically. Yet, as David Swan, CTO of actuarial and consulting firm Milliman illustrates, there are some reservations about the shift. “The truth of the matter is with mobile technologies, you could build an entire consulting company in the cloud and nobody would ever have to come to work. Is that okay? Is it okay if people don’t have walls? Some Milliman practices virtualize that way. Everybody works from their home office.”

Swan raises an interesting point, and I expect new businesses will emerge “without walls” and be based entirely on mobile devices connected to the cloud. In that situation, the economics are unbeatable.

If that’s the case, companies will need to understand how mobile computing will potentially impact their competitive position in the market, and what they can do now to stay ahead of the curve. But before we explore that, let’s review a few companies that missed the mobile call.

Today: It’s Adapt or Die

In her new book, Kill The Company, Lisa Bodell explains why it’s imperative for organizations to change and how we are our own worst enemy: “The very structures put in place to help businesses grow are now holding us back.” These structures have blocked companies from innovating and creating new shareholder value, condemning them instead to a type of sterile dogmatism. Ask yourself:

Why Didn’t Kodak invent Instagram? Kodak’s internal DNA defined itself as a traditional organization built on cameras and film. And, as most command and control companies do, their culture suffered from a case of innovator’s dilemma – where entrenched employees and demanding customers held the company back from disrupting their own profitable markets. Kodak’s core business and the people that controlled it would surely have killed any attempt to create a non-revenue-generating mobile application. And that’s a shame, considering Facebook’s Zuckerberg decided to purchase Instagram, with its 30 million users, for $1 billion.

Why didn’t Zagat invent Yelp? For nearly 28 years, Zagat was the undisputed powerhouse in local advertising and reviews. But like most newspapers, its founders never understood the shift to mobile computing, despite the fact that everyone is armed with smartphones or tablets. That mistake led Zagat to sell out last year to Google for a reported $100 million , while 8-year-old Yelp is today worth $1 billion.

Why didn’t the Music Labels invent iTunes? While music artists relied upon record labels to promote them on TV, radio and online, the music labels were run by traditionalists that didn’t understand the move first to the internet and then to mobile devices. Worse, the top labels are run by legions of lawyers that would rather fight their fate in court than embrace the move to mobile technologies. Note to everyone: unless your primary business is law, allowing attorneys to run your business is a certain sign of decline. In fact, just last year, EMI filed for bankruptcy protection; a sign of more to come?

Why didn’t Rand McNally invent Waze? Established in 1868, the famous mapmaker was the undisputed leader in road maps for decades. But it too was led by people that resisted veering off the cash cow highway. The company missed the digital mapping trends on CDs and the internet, then filed for bankruptcy in 2003. Restructured, it then failed again to capitalize on social and mobile trends that could have fueled its revival. Meanwhile, Waze just passed the 10 million user mark in January 2012, and its free GPS navigation application appears to be accelerating.

If I were to consolidate each of these examples into one lesson, it is that if there’s a way to disrupt your industry with mobile technologies, it either is happening now, or will happen within the next few years.

Why will businesses need to adapt? 

In the next 5 years, we’ll see mobile technologies disrupt traditional business at scale. Those who leverage mobile technologies will be more adaptive and responsive and ultimately more competitive by enabling push and pull access to contextual information from anywhere in the world.

Mike Edwards, Director, Digital & Experiential Marketing at Amway, describes the direct sales organization’s urgency to equip its distribution channel with on-the-go computing: “I’ve never seen any [IT initiative] with that level of speed in our organization. What we’re trying to do now is focus on how do we build an enterprise organization around digital and mobile technologies. In fact, for our distributors, we take a mobile-first approach, and then adapt that to our internet web experience.”

While most organizations are still trying to figure out how to best utilize social media to get closer to customers, employees and partners, few, like Amway, are thinking about using mobile technologies to do it. It’s a critical missed call.

But who can blame them? Change is occurring so quickly now that only the companies built to be immediately responsive to customer changes will remain competitive. When most everyone in the world can be reached instantly, and when anyone anywhere can purchase a product, view a video, and create content, there are immeasurable opportunities to listen and engage with a global audience.

Yet the most significant opportunities for leveraging the use of mobile technologies in business lie in the hands of your employees. They lie in the use of mobile devices to capture innovations seen outside the workplace; they lie in sharing documents and content with each other whether traveling or at home; and they lie in creating new mobile applications that quickly and efficiently allow on-the-go workers to complete tasks that are integrated into the organization’s front- and back-end systems.

In the past, knowledge workers spent days doing what we can do with mobile devices in mere seconds. Just 20 years ago, if you wanted to take a picture, develop it, and send it around to your co-workers, the process took weeks. Just 10 years ago, while some mobile devices included rudimentary cameras, most were taken with digital cameras, then downloaded to the computer, then sent out via email in hours. Today, the process of taking and uploading a picture to hundreds of sites can be done in seconds.

In order to stay competitive, your organization must learn to harness connected mobile computing devices to do things faster, more efficiently and within context.

Three Strategies to Prepare for the Mobile Future

To view mobile technologies as tactical devices to place calls, receive emails and to launch Angry Birds is a form of mobile malpractice. The convergence of mobile technologies, cloud computing, data analytics and social media has established an innovation platform with unprecedented potential. There has never been a better time for that instinctive, human creative impulse to design, to build, and to ship.

That driving force is the key factor and reason why it’s imperative that you prepare and adapt mobile computing into your workplace. Your workforce needs solutions that connect them to the organization, no matter where they are, no matter what the time.

Here’s how you begin to prepare your workforce and partner ecosystem:

1. Deliver a full-featured mobile-first engagement that aligns with your desktop experience. Crippling your partners and mobile workforce whenever they leave the desktop and pull out a mobile device is going to cost you your competitive advantage.

2. Evaluate opportunities to integrate your existing information and collaboration tools into your mobile devices, rather than offering all new, standalone, silo options. ParenteBeard’s CIO Cynthia Allen explained to me how they were gaining an advantage by “using a mobile solution by harmon.ie to allow access to information in a convenient, quick-to-access format stored on ParenteBeard SharePoint team sites in a format optimized for tablets and smart phones.”

3. Measure – Measure – and Measure again. Use mobile analytics to understand what’s working and not working. Without analytics, you don’t know what’s really moving the business forward. Make analytics a priority.

Mobile technologies offer the greatest economic opportunity seen in the past 25 years. New companies will emerge without walls, and smart companies will utilize mobile technologies to become more effective. Other companies won’t be able to get out of their own way to survive.

Keep in mind that Apple sold more iOS (iPads and iPhones) in 2011 (156 million), than all the Macs ever sold (122 million). So instead of ignoring or fighting the trend, let’s learn how to better adapt our businesses to mobile technologies.

They’re going to be with us for a while.