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

Chapter 11. Protect: Manage the Danger of Moblity

The previous chapters describe how businesses can capture the power of mobility to create tremendous differentiation as mobility gets built into every product, service, and process. As noted there, capturing the power of mobility will be full of challenges. In some respects, these challenges can be viewed as dangers of mobility to be managed.

However, this chapter deals with more mundane dangers that all companies will face as mobility becomes integrated into how we do business. Whether or not a company chooses to capture the power of the new technology, it will need to manage the danger. Even businesses that fail to use mobility to lead their industries in creating differentiation eventually will need to adopt mobility to close the gap created by their competitors.

What Are These Dangers?

An entire book could be written on the dangers that we can already see from mobility. Unfortunately, new dangers will emerge as mobility is increasingly integrated into how we live and work, so this chapter should not be viewed as a comprehensive checklist against which you should manage your mobility risk. However, history also gives us a solid foundation for understanding the general areas of challenge that businesses will face.

In short, we should be prepared to manage three key interrelated classes of danger:

1. Data security

2. Financial exposure

3. Third-party claims

Data Security

Perhaps the greatest danger related to mobility is that mobile devices are, ...