Start thinking today about how to leverage it to your advantage
My nephew recently asked a girl to an eighth-grade dance via text message, despite persistent advice from his cousin (my daughter) to ask the big question in person. She insisted texting was lame, until I reminded her that she broke up with her boyfriend over text recently, as well.
This little anecdote is telling, and not surprising to anyone who spends any time with teenagers. They’re incredibly comfortable with texting as a means of communications—for everything from what time they’re meeting at a movie theater to relationship management.
This level of comfort goes beyond texting. The latest smart mobile devices are their personal information centers. They use them to get directions, to find good restaurants and make reservations, to watch videos, and yes, even to fill out college applications. (The latter is one of the more astounding examples I’ve seen lately: My daughter filled out a Big Ten university application and wrote an essay via her iPhone. Despite my horror and insistence that she wouldn’t get accepted because there probably were errors in the essay, she did get accepted.)
These examples are foreshadowing the future of mobile devices, reliance on the Internet, and the disregard from anything that ever resembled boundaries of what one could access and from where.
Major carriers are planning for explosive demand on the Internet and the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. Cisco recently projected a compound annual growth rate of 108% for global mobile data traffic. It further estimates more than 5 billion personal devices will be connected to mobile networks by 2014, not to mention billions of machine-to-machine nodes.
These trends are making their way into businesses, as well. In 2008, only 41% of companies had developed mobility strategies, according to Nemertes mobility research. By 2009—just one year later—75% companies were focused on developing mobility strategies, which include company plans for applications, services, and product support, as well as how the company will leverage mobility to increase revenue, reduce costs, improve customer service and boost productivity.
Companies that are not preparing for the mobile influx, or those who are doing so half-heartedly, are setting themselves up for a world of hurt. Already, companies are losing bright, young hires to competitors who offer a better technology and mobility package. One airline, for example, has wisely implemented a recruitment program in which the recent college grads have the ears of senior executives, who want to know how they measure up to other companies they’re interviewing or for whom they have interned.
The folks in this position probably still asked their eighth-grade dates to dances in person (or through a friend!), but the upcoming generation will be more connected and integrated into their mobile device than ever before. It’s imperative for IT and business leaders to start thinking today about how they can leverage that dependency to their advantage.
What’s more, they must re-evaluate their network plans so that the network of tomorrow supports high-bandwidth applications within and outside of the traditional corporate borders, delivered to mobile applications possibly even more than they’re delivered to the desktop or laptop.
