Mobile is Eating the World
Consumer & Enterprise
In the 1970s, Martin Cooper, a brilliant engineer from Motorola, had a brilliant idea: He wanted to make phones mobile and portable. In April 1973, Martin Cooper — who’s now known as the “father of the cell phone” — became the first individual to make a call on a portable device. The phone weighed more than two pounds, and it took 10 hours to charge it for just under 35 minutes of conversation. It was a far cry from today’s sleek handheld devices — and with its $4,000 price tag, it was hard to imagine it ever becoming a crucial part in everyday life, used by everyone from businessmen to elementary school children. Today, smart phones are an inexorable part of our existence thanks to Apple & Google for their mobile platforms. We must also thank the declining prices of processors that’s made it even cheaper to have computing powers unimaginable at Martin Cooper’s time. Mobile today isn’t just about mobility and portability, it is the new center of technology. The so called Post PC era has just begun as we still have unexploited opportunities waiting for us in almost every industry we know of. In Benedict Evans’s words: smartphone is the new sun. Everyone everywhere in the world will have a smartphone one day. They won’t all have a PC of that I am sure. PC had its era and is being displaced by mobile altogether. In the same way mobile will be displaced by something else in the future but we are not there yet. For now we have a huge opportunity in front of us to take advantage of.
As we all know a lot has been done on the consumer side when it comes to mobile technology platforms. From Uber to Airbnb we have seen industry after industry being disrupted. Then there is mobile payments and retail, it just goes on and on. All this disruption has changed the way we consume goods and services, our lives have become easier for good. Everyday there is a new app that does something new and unimaginable. This trend will go on for a while until we figure out what is next (I am not going to talk about VR, AR et al because I don’t think they will become mainstream, at least not yet. They might end up like 3D TVs, who knows). Our personal lives have gotten so much better since the inception of the iPhone. Some might argue it’s been otherwise but let me tell you it really depends on perspective.
What about our work lives though?
Enterprise technology is still old and legacyish today. Many people believe that enterprise tech is behind because it can be but the question is should it be? We still haven’t entirely opened the doors of enterprise mobility. I am not talking about pretty interface connected to legacy systems. I am talking about a true mobile enterprise platform where processes, workflows, reports, tasks, dashboards, communication are built, integrated, automated and run on mobile. A platform that is 100% mobile. No PC or web browser.
Enterprise mobility is key to the future of work. The future of work is agile, desk less and mobile. Over 1.5 billion people in the world don’t sit behind a desk and most of them own a mobile phone which they use in some way to do their job. So for CIOs & CTOs out there it is Go Mobile or Go Home! A new report from Forrester confirms what many people intuitively know: CIOs have no room for failure when it comes to mobile. The report, “Mobile Becomes A Key Success Imperative For CIOs,” has this blunt warning:
“The CIO who fails in mobile will lose his job.”
It’s no idle warning. Forrester report data shows that the most “mobile-mature” companies have higher growth rates than companies that are mobile laggards. Mobile does even more than that, the report concludes: It can also transform the way organizations work, bring down costs and improve efficiency. The report explains:
“Mobility is the single most critical tool to support the top strategic business imperatives. In his role as business enabler, the CIO must deliver high-quality mobile solutions to his organization or risk being replaced.”
To give you a simple example: Imagine how much faster your business could run — for example — if you could assign a service technician automatically to an incident irrespective of their current location. The app would then automatically trigger an appointment with the customer and order spare parts so they can be delivered in time. Additionally, required service manuals could be provided in real-time on the service technician’s mobile device.
I truly believe that true enterprise mobility is the next technology revolution waiting to happen in enterprise. It will make our work lives better just like consumer tech has. We will have better work life balance as we become more and more detached from the desk and the cubicle. We at Corpa built a platform that helps you take your processes, workflows, reports, dashboards and communication mobile. With Corpa you have the ability to accelerate and enrich the capture, transmission and provision of situational and context-related real-time process information and, most importantly, significantly reduce the time needed for decisions. It is a path to enterprise productivity, efficiency & agility at an entirely new scale. It is the most flexible, dynamic and uncomplicated way to run your entire organization on mobile yet.
If you haven’t give Corpa a try yet. You can do so by downloading the app here.
Inam Haq
Founder/CEO
corpa.io
