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Technology has changed so many aspects of our lives that it is sometimes important to acknowledge how different our perspective is on modern life compared to just a few decades ago.
The invention of the internet, for example, was motivated by the desire to make things more efficient. The British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wanted to have access to documents that were relevant to his work at CERN in Switzerland without having to go to the particular computer on which they were stored. His solution was to create an infrastructure that allowed all of the computers to communicate so that all of them could have access to the documents that each of them stored on their hard drives. Today, about 3.7 billion people have access to the internet, and it has changed not only our political discourse but also the way we learn, connect and create. However, it would be nothing without devices which we use to access it. As of the start of this year, 77% of Americans had a smartphone and 73% have broadband at home. These figures demonstrate not only how popular the internet is, but also how it can be utilized in a business context.
Intra-business communication is a crucial part of any successful and efficient organization. Lots of your employees probably already have a smartphone and will be able to use it to communicate with you and their colleagues while they are working. However, this paradigm, while useful, is something that you need to monitor. The nature of EMM vs. MDM is important. Enterprise mobility management refers to the reality of managing the network of mobile devices that a business uses every day. Mobile device management is more self-explanatory. MDM, in particular, is crucial because if you allow potentially sensitive information to be stored on a mobile device that is lost or stolen, your company could suffer as a result. Introducing the appropriate security software is a good idea, as is educating your employees on the best ways to prevent data breaches or cyber attacks like the ones that struck countries all over the world recently.
Most businesses today have a website and also have dedicated staff that curate their social media presence. A lot of customers are now comfortable spending money online. In fact, the e-commerce market boasted over $1.9 trillion in sales last year alone. The emergence of m-commerce is impressive too with a sizable chunk now being spent on customers’ mobile devices. If your business offers services that take place in the real, analog world, an online store may not be all that useful to you. However, you can use the internet to advertise those services and to collate and present positive customer reviews. If you do sell products, an online store is a great option. They are reasonably inexpensive to set up, and the infrastructure of delivering packages to customers is well established and quite efficient. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) is becoming more and more important in business as the need to refine one’s website in order to convert people who are browsing into people who are buying so obviously correlates to potential revenue.
