The iPhone Ushers in An Age of True Mobility
The mobile phone and the internet have already transformed peoples’ social lives and made a great impact in the workplace. Most of us can still remember the first clunky handsets became available as executive toys or car phones, not something for the masses.
But today the workplace is on the verge of becoming truly mobile, totally virtual to the concept of the “office”. In fact it is no exaggeration to suggest that the concept of the office that we and particularly our parents grew up with will be completely redrawn over the next five to 10 years as mobility becomes woven right into the fabric of working practices across enterprises of all sizes.
Indeed the impact of this impending mobility revolution will be felt most strongly in smaller organisations, the SMEs, which generally have not yet given staff remote access to communications and messaging services.
Even in larger enterprises, mobile access to messaging and communications remains a disjointed affair at present, obtained through a combination of laptops in hotspots, and VPNs, on an intermittent basis.
Of course nearly everybody in advanced nations has a mobile phone now: penetration has reached the point where the population of handsets is greater than people in a few countries such as the Netherlands and Japan. This familiarity with the mobile phone, along with the dexterity to exploit its features efficiently, has created the cultural platform, and the basic underlying skill set, for the mobility revolution in the workplace, without any need or role for formal education.
But this alone would not deliver true mobile working without three key technological developments.
The first is ubiquitous broadband bandwidth as offered by existing or emerging 3G and 4G cellular networks, providing always-on access to enterprise applications and communications services. By definition, full mobile working, in effect taking the office with you wherever you go, cannot be achieved if connectivity is intermittent, with broadband access confined to hotspots or patches of coverage in urban areas.
The second key step is the device itself, which must have the processing capability, memory and above all user interface needed to make mobile access seamless and match as closely as possible the experience of the office desk with a PC and fixed line phone.
The arrival of Apple’s iPhone and particularly the second version, the iPhone 3G, launched in June 2008, proclaimed this new era of portable devices providing the display, touch screen capability for easy input of text, and functions needed to interact with corporate applications, even if it was initially conceived more for consumer applications.
Of course there are other devices edging towards this idea of the universal mobility enterprise handset, such as the RIM BlackBerry Storm; the Sony P990i smartphone; the T-Mobile HTC Google; and the Nokia N96 16 gigabyte smartphone.
But the iPhone — along with Apple’s associated decision to target the corporate market seriously for the first time — is the herald announcing enterprise mobility’s coming of age.
Apple’s cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs is notori- ous for his dislike of wearing a suit and until now has not gone for suits as customers either. But that is all changing, as Apple realises that its future as a major IT player lies as much in enterprise mobility as in consumer chic.
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