Mobile’s Future is Changing "Offline," Not "Online"

Some, including entrepreneur Edward Aten, think mobile will be disruptive to the extent it solves "offline" problems for people, not "online" issues. 

In other words, the big opportunities are not so much in making the smart phone a better screen and experience, but making it a tool to solve problems of friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity in the offline world. 

So the real value is less in the way a smart phone functions as a smaller-screen version of a PC, and more in the way mobility gets applied to solve a wider range of real-world problems in real time. 

Unlike some who casually say the "smart phone era is ending," Aten and others believe it is just beginning. That would tend to match past experience with really transforming technology. The benefits frequently are not seen for quite some time. 

The perhaps classic example is the "productivity revolution" personal computers were supposed to bring. Lots of people have studies the matter and been puzzled as to why the expected gains were not seen, even after decades of heavy investment. 

Technology adoption only improves productivity if it is accompanied by concurrent changes in the way work is done, way work is organized.

For example, many would note that there was a substantial increase in productivity during the twenty-year stretch from 1980 to 2000, fueled by companies' investments in enterprise-wide information technology. 

But some research has found scant evidence of major change in the 1980s, and highly-concentrated changes in the 1990s. In other words, a decade passed with very modest apparent gains, and even in the 1990s, when some vertical markets saw big gains, many other sectors really did not benefit very much.

In fact, just six industry segments showed clear evidence of productivity impact: semiconductors, wholesale, securities, retail, computer manufacturing and telecom (specifically "mobile").

But McKinsey analysts point out that there were several driving forces in each industry, that those forces were not the same in each industry, and that information technology was but one of several apparent drivers of productivity growth. 

'However, McKinsey research on the returns generated by these investments found that productivity growth occurred only when the technology was accompanied by thoughtful business process innovations tailored to sector- and company-specific business processes. 

In fact, technology adoption alone, without the accompanying changes in work practices, had little or even a negative impact on productivity.

One might therefore argue that mobile technology's ability to significantly disrupt various industries will hinge on how much each of those industries can reorganize its processes to adapt to mobility. 

History suggests progress will be uneven.