The Power of Mobility: How Your Business Can Compete and Win in the Next Technology Revolution

Chapter 6. Digitize: Capture the Power Unleashed by Moore’s Law

These days, business runs on bits. It’s no longer checks in the mail, but rather electronic transactions. It’s no longer cards in a Rolodex, but a customer database. It’s no longer numbers in a ledger book, but a financial accounting system.

Whether we’re talking about the world’s largest corporation or the gas station on the corner, every aspect of business has become digital.

Or has it?

How much information that’s critical to the success of your business on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis still exists as ink on paper—or worse, locked up in someone’s head? Or on one person’s computer that no one else ever sees?

Those islands of information represent business risk and lost opportunity.

Digital data represents tremendous opportunity because it can be relational.

A business card is associated with a person. That person might be an employee of an important customer of yours. That customer has business information, such as the locations you ship products to and how and where they want you to submit invoices so you can get paid. The information on a business card can become digital data that is related to a person, which can be digitally related to his employer, which can be digitally related to locations, which can be digitally related to shipments and invoices. This digital data could be the heart of your revenue stream.

People place orders for companies. Those orders need to be fulfilled, which impacts your inventory. The ...