Penmanship and the Zen of Mobility
My mother was a penmanship teacher. She not only taught penmanship, she also knew calligraphy. Back then, people would create beautiful hand-written letters, which required a lot of thought (since you couldn’t correct mistakes), so when people put pen to paper they were already thinking in paragraphs. I have stacks of very artistic looking letters my grandparents wrote to me when I was little, but I have not actually received a hand-written letter in decades (When was the last time you received a hand-written letter? Not a note, an actual letter?). When typewriters became the norm (starting with typing class in high school) the nature of how we communicate started shifting. The emphasis on handwriting skills disappeared, people suddenly had the ability to change what they had written (as long as you didn’t mind dealing with White-Out), but they were still forced to think in paragraphs. Then personal computers came along, and suddenly the need to clearly organize your thoughts before starting became less relevant, because you could make transactional or wholesale changes with a click. Handwriting remained extinct as an art form, but clarity of communication in the end deliverable became more viable.
Fast forward to today. The biggest change by far in our lifetime has been the rise of mobility as a communications enabler. Now we’re at the point where billions of us are in instant, global contact, exchanging 140 character tweets, and speaking in haiku. This is not necessarily a bad thing, there is something to be said for pithiness, but it is another transformative shift in how we exchange information with those around us.
So how does this tie to enterprise mobility?
Because we are all going mobile, which defines the way we will communicate going forward. It’s not just how we communicate with each other, but also how we communicate with enterprise resources. The display space for a mobile device such as an iPhone is very different from that of a desktop PC with a 27 inch monitor, and therefore the way information is delivered to the end user will follow the same haiku model. Mobilizing an enterprise application forces a prioritization of information due to the smaller screen, and reduces it to the Zen of communicating enterprise workflow requirements. This means your mobile workers, workgroups, and associated workflows are going to be forced to deal with the crux of the matter, and any ancillary noise will fall by the wayside. This is a perfect example of less is more, and is one of the core drivers of the ongoing transformation of the enterprise. The question is, what is that crux, and how can you leverage it for competitive advantage?