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Consumers are benefitting from companies committing to differentiation and disruption. Almost every facet of consumer life has been subjected to upheaval by technological tectonics: scheduling; reading; entertainment; fitness and health; communication; financial management; cooking; home security and management; and electricity consumption, just to name a few.

Life has been made more efficient. Distance is less of a hurdle for communication than ever before. We are able to micromanage the majority of our lives all from a handful of devices. We are able to access the internet at an unprecedented rate of availability.

There’s one glaring take-away from all of this—the business world is far, far behind the consumer one.

You name it and there is a deficiency. Many companies lack an effective website, especially one that is fully functional when viewed on a mobile device. Paper-based processes in departments such as Accounting and Operations still cause the backlogging of information and the slowing of business.

The real absurdity of this is that most people working at these companies use mobile phones for managing their personal life, yet switch them off or put them away when it comes time to do business.

Imagine: using your phone as an alarm, you wake up and read the news on your phone as you eat breakfast. You download a podcast and listen to it on your commute. You send a few emails, make an appointment in your calendar that automatically syncs to your laptop, and make a note to remember to pick up some groceries on your way home.

You get to work, take out your headphones, put your phone into your bag and proceed to fill out dozens of pages of paperwork. You sort through files searching for a specific document for an hour before realizing you’ve been looking in the wrong folder, it was mislabeled. You set out on your route to check up on a few devices at client sites. You arrive and write down the time, answering a few questions on the sheet of paper. You double check the old paperwork you brought along, shuffling through past audits and service requests.

The dichotomy between these two worlds is stark, especially considering it is vastly within the realm of possibility for many businesses to transition into using mobile technology. Integrating mobile technology means a world of difference when talking about tedious and time-consuming business processes. One would think the business world would be leading the consumer one, but it’s not, and it’s far past time that the business world catches up, catches on and goes mobile.