Mastering Data Management

More in MDM

• Best Practices in Test Data Management: Discovering and Subsetting
• TDWI Chicago Preview: Data Warehousing, Analytics & More
• Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Data?
• MDM for Chief Privacy Officers: A healthcare provider example

More from Stephan Zoder

• An AppStore for MDM?
• Break Up your MDM Boulder. Float it in the Cloud.
• Subscriber Data Management: From Limited to Limitless
• More Mobile, More Competitive Government

Share this Post

Recent Comments

• ICMCC News Page » Where East Meets West: ehealth in China and the US on Where East Meets West: ehealth in China and the US
• Kim’s Training Podcast on Training as a Safety Net: Kim May
• TDWI Chicago Preview: Data Warehousing, Analytics & More | Mastering Data Management on New ebook: Understanding Big Data

Are you mentally mobile? Stephan explains how to shift your mind to be more agile.

Mobility can mean a lot of things. Since I explained my interest and motivation in my prior post, let me just level-set what I mean by MOBILITY. Mobility is all about mental mobility. Once we have grasped this, we’ll move into social, economic, communication, transportation and visualization based mobility.

Ultimately, you have to amass lots of source data by talking to people of various backgrounds and digesting books and other content on various subjects. These are well structured in themselves. You see a presentation about the future business models of the communications industry, you listen to an NPR interview about a new book on foreign relations with China, or you talk to your Indian developer colleague about how his culture values education.

However, they are un- or semi-structured only in a mobile context. To be mentally mobile, you must adapt all these stories, filter the nuggets (the key idea constructs) out of them, combine them, mix them up again, and combine them again to see what different strands of reasoning or insight will come out. These constructs may be chronological, process-oriented, option-based, etc.

For example, on average, people with a higher education earn more money over a lifetime. They are working higher value-added processes and are more mobile, meaning they can command a higher premium by shopping around jobs. The ability to get a higher education is largely still dependent on parental income and high school grades. Teacher quality and parental involvement are key factors in high school grades. Parental involvement depends on parents’ ability to devote time. Time availability is driven by how many hours a profession has to work to achieve a sustaining income level. One can therefore hypothesize that parents’ lack of professional qualification restricts income and thus available time that can be invested in their kids’ schooling.

I am sure there is some analytical and simulation software out there to do this, but your thinking must be able to accomplish most of this and then let technology assist in driving out the nitty-gritty.

I am not an anthropologist or neurologist who can tell you if this cerebral capacity is an inherited or learned trait. Software may help put numbers on this theory, but let’s face it, people’s heads make this happen at the initial level. Once you have one or a couple of these construct strands, you can “implement” many other “mobility actions” with this mental mobility. You could:

• Acquire an educational certificate allowing you to go for a higher paying job
• Physically move to another location where your current skill set is better rewarded
• Conclude that you are an expert in your field, so why not take the time to learn something else, not necessarily impacting your remuneration next month or year
• Market yourself differently with your current skill set
• Use new tools (or existing tools in a new way) that allow you to make your life faster, slower or more comfortable
• Start engaging people you previously would not have due to economic, social or professional gaps
• Start working with competitors or business models with which you see few commonalities

Let me be clear: I do understand that there are boundaries and obstacles. Families are not easily moved. There may be a language barrier. Degrees may not transfer. New tools may cost money you currently do not have. It may take effort (money, time) to acquire a skill or command of a supporting tool. And of course, this all requires some sort of safety net and cultural framework that forgives economic failure. However, what I am saying primarily is that it requires strategy.

In the US, this is a combination of drastic personal change strategies supported by rather mild government policies. In Europe, it is largely a strong government strategy supported by minor personal changes. This is why you often have longer and less harsh economic cycles in Europe requiring slow adaptation versus short, harsh cycles in the US that allow for rebounds and nose-dives that force Americans to reinvent themselves quickly and often.

The “great recession” affecting the industrialized world will change this. Europeans will have to start being more American and the US government will likely become a bit more European in terms of its interference in the economy.

Our new captains of industry (Bezos, Ellison, Palmisano, Jobs and Zuckerberg) mobilize companies like Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Apple, Oracle and, yes, IBM to invent new products, markets, messages and futures every day. This is why IBM has been around for 100 years and why the New Economy players are dominating the consumer wallet and attention.

We better get used to the reality that this is the world of tomorrow. You better get started with something mobile and you better start it soon. The other guys are already on chapter 2. Ultimately, to paraphrase and extend Mandelbaum and Friedman’s assertion, you have to invent your next job, business model, life. Technology will help, but folks without the required attitude need not apply.

Next time we will talk about how companies embrace mobility.