“Oh mama, can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again.”
Those words were written by Bob Dylan almost 47 years ago. At the time, they certainly had nothing to do with mobile as we understand it, but by a strange quirk, they do have something to say about mobility today. Let me explain.
There’s no doubt mobility is going to be a major force in our business and personal lives. In many cases, it already is. I won’t go into the usual spiel about BYOD here because many of you are probably much more adept at explaining just how much the landscape has been changed by the huge numbers of people using smartphones and tablets.
You only have to look around you to see that this isn’t just marketing guff. These things are being used and people are looking to use them at work as well. Some employers are already making it possible for their workers to do just that and many more are going to follow. Lots of people in business and the IT industry will tell you it’s a win-win because employees get to use the device they want and the company doesn’t have to buy the equipment merely ensure it can be deployed on the network in a secure and efficient manner. It also enables businesses to have a more mobile workforce either in terms of people being able to work out in the field or from home.
All of this is great in terms of mobility but it’s not a solution to all ills. Take the occasions when inclement weather, be it wind, snow or rain, causes serious disruption to travel networks in the country.
The good news is that if you have a ‘mobile workforce’ that spends more of its time working from home then it isn’t going to affected by travel disruption. Except, at the expense of appearing pedantic, those employees aren’t really mobile because all they are doing is changing their place of work from the office to the house. Quite a few people can do that, of course, because their work is desk-based and all they are doing is working from a different desk using a different device. They do this by being even less mobile than they would have been in the past because they don’t even have to leave the house and commute to work.
What about the mobile workforce that spends most of its time travelling on the road? Those people will be hit especially hard. And if a company is planning to make more of its workforce mobile in this sense then, it stands to reason, more of them will be affected.
Theoretically, they can work while they’re stranded on whatever section of road they happen to be caught on. I say theoretically because, aside from phone calls (which you can do on any Bluetooth-enabled mobile), it’s an offence and very unsafe to be reading the screen or keying text into a smartphone or tablet while sitting behind the wheel of a car. They might not have the Memphis (or M50) blues again but those people really are stuck inside of mobile.
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