The Route to True Competive Advantage: Today's Evolution of Workforce Mobility

The promise of working on the go is here.  However, harnessing the power of today’s mobile technology takes more than the mere acquisition of IT tools—whether they are PDAs, smartphones, or Wi-Fi enabled laptops.  Realizing the potential of mobile technologies requires that organizations carefully architect how they leverage the power of a new and expanding breed of mobile solutions. Done right, an organization can gain advantage over its competitors by improving speed and quality of service, while encouraging collaboration and communication between employees, customers and partners.

Think about it, business often presents situations when decisive action is required and success is based on the information available to the employee. These are instances that can make or break a major deal—decisive moments companies can’t afford to lose.   But many moments in business are more commonplace. For example, when a team is gathering to discuss a project, but every team member is in a different building or country.

When a business is empowered through mobile technology, conversations and information flow more freely. As a result, employees and teams are more in the know and more responsive. They can take the necessary action, inform the people who need to know and interact directly with the backend systems to see what the rest of the team is seeing. By being more agile, productive and cost-efficient, this new-found power helps their company create a competitive edge and leverage their people and  information more opportunistically.

Critical to the success of true workforce mobility is the involvement of the IT organization. By taking a tiered, holistic approach, IT can mobilize processes and operations to meet the ongoing needs of the entire organization. Doing so is relatively easy and cost-effective, leveraging the existing IT infrastructure and business applications and extending those resources to the mobile workforce.