User talk:C sibanda MGCR331

What is driving Mobile Society                                               By: Cynthia Sibanda

Mobile Society is the wireless communication technology era which has been growing at an amazingly rapid rate over the past few years especially since the introduction of the internet.

The mobile society is being driven by the increased mobility by organizations and individuals as a result of the search for the best value added activities or processes at minimal cost, maximum speed and at the best quality as evidenced by the rise in the following :

 Globalization  Doing Business in multiple countries has meant a lot of travel for some people as well as an increased need for quick, efficient and cost effective communication tools. The different organization branches need to communicate and send information securely from branch to branch and staff members traveling need to be in contact with the home branch and the branch they are visiting as well as with their families. With all traveling, people want to work, communicate and access resources as they travel and this has encouraged more and more innovation in wireless technology.

 Outsourcing  A lot of business processes are now being broken up into many pieces, where different processes or departments are transferred to external providers to be coordinated and managed externally and some of these external providers are in a different country or city and businesses need to keep in constant touch with these external processes to maintain the organization operating efficiently

 Changes in Workforce  In the competitive workforce market that exists now, businesses have to be innovative in benefits that they offer their employees in an effort to retain workers one of the ways they have done that is with a work life and family life balance with the introduction of Telecommuting.-allowing employees to work from home.For this to be effective, the organization needs to have an efficient and secure network from which the staff members to work from and a lot of organizations e.g IBM are equipping employees with Laptops instead of desktop computers to enable them to work from almost anywhere

Innovation There are more resources available for wireless technology research and more and more people are graduating in the field, increasing the available researchers and as a result there are more people coming up with new software, hardware, engineering etc.… and hence the competition is increasing and driving the direction of society.With innovation over the years,the once heavy,bulky and expensive cellphones and laptops are now extremely light, more portable and affordable and thus more convenient and accessible to more people and thus encouraging the production of wireless devices.

Businesses have also come up with mobile ways of doing business in the form of self serve services, such as online banking. Services like these, which allow consumers to carry out transactions without going to the business establishment increase mobility in that, it increases the need and use of devices that enable one to access anything, anytime, anywhere.

References : Zeleny ,M (200) ``The Mobile Society,Effects of global sourcing & network organization``,Int, J.Mobile leaening & Organization,Vol 1,No1 pp36