I am sitting in my leather reading chair with my coffee next to a warm, early morning fire reading about enterprise mobility. I am re-reading Aberdeen Group's
Mobility in ERP 2011, which is one of the best reports I have read all year, and
Cognizant's whitepaper,
Enterprise Mobile Apps. Here are some of the insights I have gleaned this morning.
Aberdeen Group's paper: Best-in-Class companies spend 25% of the work week trying to access information, all the others spend almost 40% of their time trying to access information.
Cognizant's paper: Millennials (i.e. generation Y) - will increasingly be unwilling to accept the idea of being bound to a desktop computer in their work lives either as employees or customers. In their minds, productivity, communications, collaborations and decision-making are all dependent on having a mobile device with which they can access their network of peers, whatever information they need, and hundreds of targeted applications.
The paper goes on to say that millennials may not even know how to work at peak capacity without mobile devices.
When you synthesize the ideas in these two papers the conclusion is that some of the most valuable employee skills both now and in the future is a thorough understanding of how to use mobile devices, mobile applications, their peer and social networks and a plethora of mobile information sources to quickly find and access the information they need to optimally do their job.
On August 14th of this year, Thomas L. Friedman, author of “
The World is Flat” wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that I found very insightful. Here are a few excerpts, "…globalization and the information technology revolution have gone to a whole new level. Thanks to cloud computing , robotics, 3G wireless connectivity, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter , the iPad and the cheap internet enable smartphones, the world has gone from
connected to
hyper-connected. This is the single most important trend in the world today."
Friedman goes on to say, "... to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this globalization (and I would add mobilization) are eliminating more and more “routine” work – the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles."
Mobile technologies and a hyper-connected world are changing consumers, employees, economics, politics and the enterprise in dramatic fashion today. It is critical that companies recognize these trends and develop an enterprise mobility strategy that incorporates and optimizes the value of these trends for their organizations.
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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Volunteer
Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict
Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
