Enterprise mobility is not simply a new set of gadgets and technologies for communications.  Enterprise mobility is transformational.  Business transformation is a process that impacts at least four major areas:

•          Concepts

•          Processes

•          Organizations

•          Technologies

Most often changes and innovations in any one of these areas, invites change in all of the areas.  Is your company re-thinking concepts, processes, organizations and technologies because of the capabilities mobile and SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) solutions have made possible?

Historically militaries have focused on 4 dimensions of warfare; land, sea, air and space.  They have focused all of their attention on building military platforms (guns, tanks, ships, aircraft, missiles, etc.) that work in these physical environments.  Today they have added a 5th dimension – information.  Today, modern militaries are focused on information-based capabilities such as quality sensors, communication links, M2M (machine to machine, and avionics) and analytics as being key areas that offer military/competitive advantages.

I am here to say that the 5th dimension is also the area where industry will find their competitive advantages in 2013.  The 5th dimension involves the ability to collect data, communicate data, analyze data and report it.  The faster this is done, the bigger the possible competitive advantages.  The role of enterprise mobility and SMAC solutions are key to all of these areas.

How does a company transform itself to achieve these competitive advantages?  I suggest that companies need to be smart about their development and use of mobile applications, big data, real-time business intelligence, social media monitoring and cloud-based applications that maximize agility.  However, technology is only one of the areas that need to experience innovation during true business transformation.  Companies also need to explore how they can transform their concepts, processes and organizations to work effectively in these new environments.

Running a real-time data driven business is different.  In requires new ways of managing so real-time action can be taken based upon real-time data.  This may require organizational changes and new business and operational models.