Wireless Work: Anytime, Anywhere

I fully realized how pervasive mobile technology has become—and how pervasive the notion is that you can do work wherever you are—when I was flipping through the channels one lazy Sunday afternoon. There, on MTV, was Puff Daddy checking e-mails on his BlackBerry while sitting on a panel of some sort. Mobile technology has evolved enough that we can do our work, from checking e-mail to accessing and modifying customer information to working on spreadsheets and documents, anywhere there is a wireless connection. Stuck in the airport on a layover? Open your laptop, access a Wi-Fi hotspot or a wireless broadband network, and do some work. Check and send e-mails while sitting in a session at an industry conference. This culture is spreading throughout businesses as more and more companies mobilize their service, sales, and delivery forces. Now, doing work while away from the office isn’t so much a convenience as it is an expectation.

I was discussing this trend in San Francisco a few weeks ago, at QUALCOMM’s 3G A-List awards, held at the CTIA WIRELESS I.T. & Entertainment show (Sept. 27-29). I was speaking with some people from Unisys and QUALCOMM, and we came to a concensus that doing work from anywhere is becoming the norm. One woman said she popped up to her hotel room between leaving the CTIA show and attending the awards to answer e-mails. Everyone jumped in with similar stories — if they hadn’t responded, a project would have been delayed, a decision would have come past a deadline, etc. Which brings up the question posed at the beginning of this article: What is the impact of this expectation of an instant response?

As the margin for response time shortens, so does the margin of deadlines and actions based around that response. One would think that, because responses could be had more quickly than a few years ago, more work could get done in less time. However, it seems the amount of work to be done has expanded to fill in that time saved.

So with more and more companies jumping on the mobile train, I think mobile technology vendors would do well to (if they don’t already) offer services to customers advising them on how to take advantage of the culture change mobility brings — to the benefit of the customers’ bottom line.