In the United States, however, security-conscious CIOs have tried to keep device proliferation and network vulnerabilities in check by limiting which devices can access corporate networks.

Those differences in culture and adoption may become more, not less pronounced in the future. By 2009 more people on the Asian continent will have made their first phone call on a mobile device than on a land line; by 2010, more of those same people will initally access the Internet on a mobile device and not a PC, says Scott Cooper, senior vice president of mobility for Nokia Enterprise Solutions.

"In India and China, they completely skipped the wired Internet," Cooper says.

If America wants to do business in Asia (and, of course, it does), it will have to go mobile, and savvy U.S. CIOs recognize that. They understand that the global business is a mobile one.

But for CIOs, getting to that future involves multiple challenges. On the customer-facing side, they need to design products and services tailored to the mobile world, and enable new kinds of connections (such as text messaging and video) to their constituents.

On the internal user front, CIOs need to overcome security concerns, figure out how to manage a plethora of devices, reduce exorbitant wireless costs, manage integration and business continuity challenges between wireless and HQ networks and prepare for new user demands such as unified messaging. ("Consumers are driving enterprises to adapt to and adopt mobile technologies," says Rizzo. "And in that way, mobility in the enterprise is really following consumers.") IDC (a sister company to CIO's publisher) estimates that by 2009, 878 million workers will be accessing corporate networks via a rainbow of mobile devices, and uploading and downloading a mix of data, voice and video.

Doing all this won't be easy, but as Fidelity's Ferra notes, there's not really much choice. Companies will have to offer lots of mobile options to their customers and users if they expect to remain competitive. "Once customers get hooked [on mobility]," Ferra says, "it becomes contagious."

The question for CIOs, therefore, is not if they should make their enterprises mobile-ready, but when. And how.

A BlackBerry Doesn't Make You Mobile
The seeds of mobile business were planted in the 1980s with the appearance of large cellular radio phones used mainly by the rich and famous (think of Gordon Gekko on the beach in 1987's Wall Street). Cell phones started shrinking just as 20-pound laptops entered the market in the 1990s—the next status symbol for the corporate elite. As mobile phones and laptops kept slimming down, the BlackBerry blew in from Canada in 1999.