TORONTO, ON – When Google speaks, the industry tends to listen. And Google says that mobility in the workplace needs to be ubiquitous in five years.
At the first ever conference held by Canadian enterprise mobility management company SOTI, Google’s product management director, Andrew Toy, said that mobility strategies at companies both big and small need to go the way of the “internet strategy” of yesteryear – in other words, simply become strategy.
“If you were to meet someone and they saw absolutely no value in owning a smartphone, you would think that’s strange,” Toy said on stage. “So if a company has mobility at its core, why are they only mobilizing part of their employee base? That’s not ok.”
The bar, he said, should be set at 100 per cent mobilization of employees, and workflows at the pace of consumer adoption.
Yet, Toy admitted that it is a challenge.
The Google executive said that the technologies to allow for this do not yet exist.
That being said, there is what he described as “low-hanging fruit” in speeding mobility and connectivity along.
“If we use the glowing rectangle analogy, we all have TVs and screens in our offices,” Toy said. “How many of your existing devices are smart and connected? You can start on that path of transformation simply by replacing existing glowing rectangles.”
Furthermore, rather than trying to make solutions work for individual problems, employees should demand tools to fit their needs, i.e. anything from a watch to a billboard.
In the same vein, IT departments should also take advantage of the full capabilities of their technology even if it’s not available across the entire environment, in essence resist “least-common denominator thinking.”
“Impact should be so large that fundamentally changes a company’s business,” he said.
“Think about when companies had internet strategy,” Troy said. “If someone asked you today, ‘What is your internet model?’ that doesn’t even make sense. It is assumed in the way we do business. Going forward, you shouldn’t go ‘what is our mobile strategy?’ Mobility will be the case in five years.”
