Top 10 reasons to mobilize

1) Mobility is already in your enterprise, you need to manage and direct it. This may seem obvious, but then again, perhaps it isn’t. Look around your company, and see if you can find one person who doesn’t have a smartphone. While you’re at it, check out how many folks have bellied up to the mobile bar and ordered themselves a tablet. Mobile devices are all over your enterprise, whether you realize it or not. If you don’t get ahead of this now, you’ll never catch up. Time to start managing.

2) A mobile workforce is far more responsive and productive than a static workforce. Workers who have instant access to the information they need, regardless of where they are, are by definition more responsive (and therefore more productive), whether it’s dealing with their peers, management, partners, etc.

3) A mobilized workforce can provide a stronger customer experience. Do you like having your calls returned quickly? Of course you do, who doesn’t? Making your employees mobile (and informed) makes them far more responsive to customer needs, and happy customers are always a good thing.

4) Mobilizing workers will increase their output. Because your employees will have more convenient access to work they need to do anyway, they’re also more likely to keep up. This creates higher output without adding more stress.

5) Mobilizing workgroups will exponentially increase output. See #4 above. If one worker becomes (e.g.) twice as productive, how about the workgroup he’s a part of? Mobilizing workgroups starts adding terms like “exponential” to your output gains.

6) Mobilizing workflows will streamline and accelerate your business operations. Applying any technology to a workflow will change it (hopefully for the better). This is particularly the case for mobility, since it can be applied to nearly any workflow, in any enterprise process, in any industry.

7) Adopting mobility early will provide a significant competitive advantage. Enterprise mobility is in a land-grab state right now. Mobilizing ahead of your competition is very similar to what happened fifteen years ago when companies that were quick to set up a web presence had a huge advantage over those who didn’t. Technology-driven competitive differentiators on this scale this don’t come along that often, you should exploit this while you can.

8) Adopting mobility will increase the ROI on current enterprise applications. Most enterprise applications are designed to be accessed from a fixed point device (your PC on a LAN). Once you provide the capability to access those same apps from a mobile device, you’ve just extended the life and reach of your applications.

9) Mobility enables instant, informed decision making and action. We are entering the age of the instant expert. We are surrounded by information all the time, regardless of where we are, and any time we want it, all we need to do is swipe our finger on a relatively small piece of metal and glass (and how cool is that?). Having the right information, at the right time, enables a vast expansion of decision points (including, for example, buying your products or services).

10) You have no choice. I mean, what, you’re not going to mobilize? This isn’t even a viable alternative anymore. Everyone is already moving in this direction (and when I say everyone, I mean billions of users with billions of devices, resulting in trillions of decision points—and that’s happening right now, while you’re reading this). You can ride the mobility wave with style and elegance, or be crushed by it, those are pretty much your options.