Here's Why Your Business Needs To Adapt To The Mobile World

In today's day and age mobile technology is more prevalent than ever before. Consumers are taking time to boot up the old desktop less often as their smartphone and/or tablet gives them access to most things their PC does, but this isn't just a trend, and it doesn't only effect consumers. All businesses, large and small are adopting more mobile platforms, coming out with more mobile offerings, and releasing products that are mobile friendly.

"In the B2B arena, your main focus should be business process improvement," writes Dan Bieler, principal business technology analysts at Forrester Research in a recent blog post. "Ensuring a great user experience and user delight are key, of course, but business process efficiency should be the main focus for the CIO. Your goal is to help the business user complete a specific task in the most efficient manner. Being able to deliver great mobile moments will also enhance your brand as an innovative industry leader and partner."

Bieler says mobile moments are when users pull out a mobile device to get what they want in their immediate context.

He also says this is what a business needs to provide, not only to appease customers, but also to keep working with partners who are already working diligently to adjust their business to accommodate the new mobile world. Without doing so, businesses won't maintain a seamless end-to-end workflow, making partnerships with a company less appealing. Outside of losing partners, without making adjustments for a better mobile business, the competition will obviously have an advantage as they will take advantage of mobile opportunities.

"Mobility is quickly becoming one of the most important battlegrounds for business innovation," Bieler writes. "Your competitors are readjusting and improving their business processes through mobility. Every CIO should have a clear strategy for a world in which every customer, worker, and supplier is hyper-productive, hyper-available, and hyper-engaged."

Without making these adjustments early, it is easy to get left behind. The mobile changes in business are already happening.

"The PC landscape is going to change," said John Marshall SVP of AirWatch, an Atlanta-based provider of enterprise mobility management software. "I don’t believe the PC is dead. It's actually still strong, but what's happening is the PC is shifting. It's being managed by the same thing that manages mobile devices. Laptop users will have a migration into a mobile cloud environment as the space is maturing."

Marshall touched on how desktop operating systems are becoming more similar to that of mobile operating systems and that we are already seeing this trend in Apple's recent releases of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. Experts in the industry say that this is not a trend that is exclusive to Apple, but it is a trend they expect to continue.

"As these next generation operating systems take over the computing landscape, such as iOS, Android and next generation Windows, the entire PC economy is going to change," Said Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, a Mountain View, CA-based provider of enterprise mobility management software. "The future is going to be smartphones and tablets, and laptops and desktops with next generation operating systems, joined to an EMM solution. If you look at Mac OS X, it is starting to behave more like iOS, and they are adding more and more iOS features to Mac OS. In Apple's latest release, it allows you to synchronize and move data between iOS and your Mac. You're starting to see the usage model and the management security model for iOS, Mac, Windows, Android, all transition to the future EMM model."