Computerworld — Mobility is big -- $1 billion big by 2014, according to analyst projections. It is the fastest-growing segment of the technology industry. It is also big in the minds of regulators, entrepreneurs, developers, investors, employees, customers and bosses. There is widespread agreement that the most important technology product no longer sits on your desk but rather fits in your hand. Increasingly one's computer experience cannot be separated from one's mobile experience. Your success as an IT leader and your reputation as a person of influence will be a function of your mobile competency.

Mobile Web Use Now The Norm
20 Mobile Trends and Future Technologies

Mobile computing devices, services and the ecosystem that surrounds them -- called an "interconnected electronic mycelium" by one Finnish philosopher of the future -- are a transformative force in politics, society and business. Social entrepreneurs like Nathan Eagle at MIT and UCLA professor Aydogan Ozcan are leveraging mobile technologies in resource-poor settings to transform public health and improve the quality of life.

What makes all this so very interesting is that the transformative force is, itself, transforming.

At Ohio State University, I recently asked a very switched-on group of MIS majors to parse the technology world into eras. There were so many vectors of change, so many things going on, that consensus failed to emerge regarding what we should call the era we are now entering. These digital natives all agreed that mobility was going to play a major role in the future. What was fascinating was that the seniors perceived a generation gap between the mobile technology they used now and how they used it and what they had embraced as freshmen and sophomores. Mobility is changing very rapidly.

Everyone working today has lived through at least three mobile telecom eras: the device era (think Motorola (MOT) RAZR), the application era (think Apple 's App Store and iTunes) and the social era (think Facebook and Twitter ). What comes next and how do we prepare for it?

Managing, leading and just staying out of trouble in the mobility space is made more difficult by the fact that enterprise entropy is increasing. The questions surrounding work -- the where, when, with whom and via what tools -- are in constant flux. In today's world, the geography of work is infinite. A nomadic workforce moves from local to global (i.e., from the head office to a meeting with clients in Tajikistan) at the whim of the market. I know one higher-education CIO who was given the mobility challenge of delivering interactive curriculum to sailors on submarines.

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