The biggest improvement for today’s mobile workers is the capability, from anywhere, to fully participate in organizational workflows. Instead of printing and handing in paperwork, the entire order process can be handled on the laptop.

This is key.

Today, there’s little to no reason for person-to-person contact. This isn’t to say it has no value — if anything, the ubiquity of mobile workers elevates personal contact into something special and valuable. In-person meetings are more significant and imbued with greater purpose and meaning.

Is there a downside to less face-to-face collaboration? How can we be creative when we’re hundreds of miles apart?

Plenty of ways, some of which we haven’t even imagined yet. The tools are in the palm of our hand. Just as workers before us transitioned from typewriters to PCs, so shall we transform our creative processes in the new world of work.

As our physical limitations melt away, now we can ask ourselves a really big question: If I can process all this information and complete tasks for one company, why not many?

Imagine a world where the payroll expert processes invoices from her home — and also does so for six different companies. Think about multiple manufacturing companies working with a service that processes raw material orders, or a global team of engineers designing bridges in the U.S. Once the designs and job are approved, construction management could be achieved with both on-the-ground assets and remote, untethered project managers — managers who are watching multiple enterprises around the globe.

The most significant evolution is having access to capable applications and data, in real time, from any connected device, anywhere. Another evolution: the real-time collection, calculation and presentation of data models, from the cloud to our palm. In this exciting era of data crunching and information sharing, in can take workers mere seconds to make decisions and take actions that once took weeks. These are key components of information mobility, and by extension, your business’s strategy for success in the coming years.