Digital Trends and Predictions for 2018

With software and adjacent technologies continuing to eat the world, we see the pace of #digital transformation accelerating in 2018 as organizations strive to enhance their customer and operational intelligence.

Organizations will grapple with a variety of digital technologies and skillsets this year to become more data-driven in order to improve their agility and decision-making capabilities. As always, they’ll be looking for ways to simplify operations and get more done with less. We predict the concepts and trends listed below will light a path for organizations to show them the way forward:

  • Climbing the Stairway from the Edge to the Cloud

The ongoing journey to move data, apps and other digital assets from private, on-premises data centers to public clouds will continue unabated as organizations look to reduce or eliminate internal ICT functions and responsibilities. Even in the midst of cutting costs, organizations will still struggle with concerns around cloud vendor lock-in via PaaS which will benefit IaaS virtual machines, container technologies like Docker and container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Mesos and Marathon. Overall, Amazon AWS plus Microsoft Azure and Office365 will continue to be the biggest beneficiaries of the public cloud megatrend. Along the way, one of the stair steps that remains on-premise is something called the Fog or the Edge. If you’re familiar with how content delivery network (CDN) proxy servers around the world cache and speed the delivery of Web content to your browser, Edge gateway devices do something similar. With more and more of an organization’s compute occurring in distant, public clouds, Edge devices residing on the local network can cache, aggregate, analyze and speed up cloud content to give employees inside the office a better experience. Edge devices can also be used with the Internet of Things where they connect to machines and cache, aggregate, and analyze data locally instead of waiting for that data to be transported to a distant cloud. Since neither people nor machines are vary tolerant of too much latency, expect the adoption of Edge gateway devices and associated local storage to surge in 2018.

  • Enhanced Networking Inside and Out

As organizations reduce the number of digital assets and activities that take place in-house, the primary role of ICT departments will be to create and maintain fast, reliable connectivity via wired and wireless technologies. Wired networking will be “more of the same” as we push speeds forward with fiber optics and Gigabit Ethernet to shuttle employees out to the Internet. Wireless is where things get more interesting. Inside the office, organizations will continue rolling out 802.11ac Wi-Fi access points running in the 5 GHz band to deliver data and high-bandwidth content like HD video to any device. Outside, the 3GPP has officially signed off on the first 5G specification which promises to deliver greater bandwidth, lower latency, better coverage, lower battery consumption and a higher number of simultaneously connected devices. As you might imagine, it will take some time to roll out technology based on this spec so we will look to get more mileage out of 4G technologies like LTE Advanced. On the slower side of things, you have Low-Power, Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) technologies that are making great strides for certain Internet of Things use cases. The ability to create a large wireless network in places where no cellular coverage exits is compelling for organizations capable of managing such a system. If you have devices or machines that don’t send much data every day, require years of battery life, or need to send data over long distances, one of the many LPWAN technologies might be a good fit. Whether you’re inside or outside, looking for narrowband or broadband, there’s plenty of wireless choices for organizations in 2018.

  • Mobility for People and IoT for Machines

While the mobile device revolution has been the biggest megatrend of this new century, the torch has now been passed to the Internet of Things. When you think about it, they’re not terribly different from each other except for the endpoints. Mobile device endpoints are proxies for people and Thing endpoints refer to machines (intelligent or otherwise). They’re both sending data about themselves and other topics of interest over a network. Both interact with apps, analytics and other on-prem or cloud data sources to derive value and business intelligence. In order to regain a level of simplicity and perhaps sanity, organizations will push back against the use of multiple enterprise platforms for Mobile people and IoT machines. Additionally, many organizations will wring their hands of having to understand an alphabet soup of protocols and myriad IoT standards and revert to using the same Web and Internet standards they already understand. Just like they currently do with Mobile and the Web, organizations will insist that IoT sends and receives JSON data to and from URLs over HTTP/REST while being displayed via HTML5, secured with TLS and brought to life with JavaScript. This use of familiar, widely-used, “good enough” Web technologies will win the day over the more advanced but esoteric technologies currently employed by IoT platforms. This move to simplicity and familiarity will reduce friction and help the Internet of Things deliver value and fulfill its promise the way the Mobile, Web and the Cloud have. Expect big changes in IoT for 2018 along with a big shakeout of the hundreds of Internet of Things platform companies.

  • Digital Twins make Everything Digital

The rise of Digital Twins will give every organization the starting point they’re looking for to begin their Digital Transformation. A Digital Twin is essentially a digital representation of a physical object. It can be a machine, a person, a complex mechanical subsystem, a collection of machines working together on an assembly line, or even a process. These twins have attributes or properties that describe them like a person’s heart rate or a motor’s temperature or current revolutions per minute (RPM). Organizations can assign key performance indicators (KPIs) to the current values of these properties. A red heart rate KPI might be 200 whereas a green motor temperature KPI might be 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Digital Twins can exhibit behavior by executing programming language and/or analytics code against the combination of their current property values and associated KPIs. Not only does this bring everything in an organization to life, it also facilitates the running of simulations to see how things will behave when different types of data points are fed to these Digital Twins. This is definitely the most promising and exciting technology for 2018.

  • Security, Privacy and GDPR cause Organizations to Stumble

Unrelenting cyberattacks keep organizations in a defensive posture rather than moving forward with important digital initiatives and deployments. While we won’t cover the myriad security steps every organization must follow in order to stay ahead of individual and state-sponsored hackers, this is one of the most important functions of an ICT department. Organizational leaders who don’t take this seriously by not funding the appropriate security technology or staffing the appropriate security employee headcount do so at their own peril. Needless to say, organizations must prioritize the privacy and protection of data, people (employees and customers), and systems if they want to remain viable. To turn up the heat a bit, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes enforceable on May, 25 2018. This regulation gives control back to EU citizens and residents over their personal data by strengthening data protections for all individuals within the  European Union as well as the export of personal data outside the EU. Quite a few companies operating in countries across the globe play it fast-and-loose with the security and privacy of individual data without user consent. This comes to an end in May when companies can be fined  up to €20 million or 4% of their global annual revenue, whichever is greater, for violating this regulation. Any company operating in the EU must obtain explicit consent for all data collected from an individual as well as reason/purpose of using and processing that data. Additionally, that user consent may be withdrawn. Many companies around the world haven’t made the necessary changes to their digital systems to be compliant with GDPR and will be in for a rude awakening in 2018. Data privacy and security matters in a big way.

  • Making Sense of an Avalanche of Data with Advanced Analytics

While data and analytics systems have been around for decades, the amount of data collected for analysis by organizations has increased exponentially. With a 50x growth rate from machines alone, the Internet of Things has become the newest data source for organizations to analyze. Lots of little data integrated from people, machines and business systems adds up to an overwhelming amount of Big Data to make sense of. Luckily, there are an increasing number of streaming and batch analytics systems and tools to tackle this job. Making this trend better is that most of these technologies are open source and free which helps level the playing field between small, mid-sized and large organizations with varying amounts of money to spend. Head over to Apache.org. Another interesting trend in data science is how Python has surpassed R as the most popular language for Machine Learning. An increase on online courseware, an abundance of scientific libraries, and the fact that Python is one of the easiest programming languages to learn, means you don’t always have to be a PhD in Statistics to get the job done. Virtually every organization in the world is looking for Machine Learning/Deep Learning expertise, so this trend should help the supply side of this equation. The last analytics trend that is coming on strong in 2018 has to do with where data is analyzed. It will no longer be the exclusive domain of the cloud or large clusters of servers. The need to answer questions and make decisions more quickly is driving analytics of all types out to the Edge. Thanks to Moore’s Law and the need to eliminate latency, more and more edge gateway devices will be performing IFTTT and even Machine Learning predictions (with models trained in the cloud). There’s no shortage of important trends that are simplifying advanced analytics for organizations in 2018.

Clearly, 2018 is going to be a transformational year where properly-equipped decision-makers and leaders can shift their organization into the next gear to accelerate their digital transformation. Hold on tight.

ROBTIFFANY.COM Named in the Top 100 Websites for IoT Industry Professionals

Top IoT Website

Thrilled to see robtiffany.com included in this distinguished group of the world’s top Internet of Things companies, news sites and individual #IoT influencers and luminaries like Rob van Kranenburg, Peggy Smedley, Stacey Higginbotham and Scott Amyx.

Years of innovating in the IoT, M2M, cloud and mobile industries combined with sharing my knowledge and opinions on https://robtiffany.com has been really rewarding for me.

Rob Tiffany Blog

Check it out at: http://blog.feedspot.com/iot_blogs/

Mobile WebViews Close the Performance Gap with Native Apps

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New WebViews with the same performance as #mobile browsers mean #web skills are finally viable for building fast, cross-platform hybrid #apps.

Back in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg admitted Facebook’s mobile strategy relied too much on HTML5 rather than native apps. While it was a great way to target multiple platforms from a single codebase, Facebook’s hybrid app suffered from poor performance. They used a WebView which is a web browser encapsulated in a software component that can be added to a native app. This allows HTML, JavaScript and CSS to run inside a native app container with access to platform APIs that browser-based apps don’t get, like the camera or push notifications. The problem was these WebViews didn’t share all the features or performance of the full web browsers.

Today, iOS 8+ includes a WKWebView API with access to the Nitro JavaScript JIT compiler and rendering performance equivalent to the Apple Safari browser. The Chromium WebView introduced in Android 4.4 KitKat takes advantage of the Google Chrome V8 JavaScript engine for dramatic gains. On Windows 10, the WebView based on the Edge browser is the ticket. All these WebView controls offer enhanced HTML5 and CSS3 feature support and significantly better performance to close the gap with native apps. If your corporate designers and developers have web skills, consider using Apache Cordova/PhoneGap or Kaonsoft to rapidly target multiple mobile platforms with a single codebase.

Reduce development expenses by building apps for all mobile platforms with a single codebase by a smaller development team using widely-available web skills that gets your apps to market more quickly and pervasively. Does your company have a hybrid web app strategy to reach more customers faster?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Give Smartphone Users Mobile Web Apps or Else!

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Replace heavyweight, desktop focused, bandwidth eating, #Web 1.0 sites with lightweight #Mobile Web apps using responsive web design.

Just like their native counterparts, many Web 1.0 apps were built with a particular screen resolution in mind where bigger was better on an endlessly scrolling screen. As time progressed throughout the late 90s, poor performing dial-up modems running at 28.8 kb/s gave way to 56 kb/s modems, followed by 128 kb/s ISDN and then true broadband with the introduction of digital subscriber line (DSL) and cable modem technologies. Web designers kept pace with this trend by loading up web pages with heavy graphics leading to slower load times and average page sizes of 2 MB.

Web apps must be designed for mobile first. This means they must load quickly, be cached for performance and use smaller JavaScript libraries and minimal graphics. Amazon says a 100ms increase in load time equates to 1% reduction in sales. Remember, nine out of ten mobile shoppers use the mobile web while in-store and 51% of that research has led to a purchase. Follow responsive web design (RWD) principles via CSS media queries to adapt to the screen size of any device. Hide navigation menus to keep layouts simple and don’t make users pinch, zoom or pan. Google reports over 70% of consumers access websites from their mobile devices while only 20% of companies have optimized their sites for mobile. Clearly, you can increase your company’s engagement with customers and employees alike via the mobile web that’s already in their hands.

Boost user productivity and revenue by delivering a fast web site that adapts itself to the device users are carrying allowing employees to complete tasks and customers to make purchasing decisions. Is your company doing everything it can to reach mobile users?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Web 1.0 Server Round-Trips are Like Watching Paint Dry

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Replace wasteful, server round-trip #Web 1.0 sites built with Cold Fusion, CGI, ASP, Servlets, Perl and Livewire with AJAX empowered #mobile web apps.

The 90s web moved from online brochures to a technology that could be used for actual apps through the clever use of the HTTP verb called POST. A web page with text boxes, radio buttons, lists and check boxes full of data could POST information to a special web server directory containing something called a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script. This would insert data into a database and build dynamic web pages. The notion of POSTing data and having servers do all the heavy lifting of executing code, connecting to databases and building new web pages made a lot of sense in a world of browsers with minimal capabilities. That said, users didn’t like the way their web pages disappeared and new pages were loaded and sent to their browser.

Things got a more interesting when asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) came along allowing a page to send and receive data from a server without refreshing. They just updated the page’s document object model (DOM) ushering in Web 2.0. Modern web apps use this technology to call web APIs using JSON instead of XML for data. Powerful HTML5 browsers with fast rendering plus just in time (JIT) compiled JavaScript facilitate advanced UI and JavaScript frameworks as well as the notion of single page apps. This is the web your employees want.

Deliver mobile web apps that respond quickly to user commands and behave like a native mobile apps to improve the productivity of your employees. What steps has your organization taken to boost the responsiveness of its mobile web apps?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Get with the Program and Migrate those Web 1.0 Intranet Apps to HTML5

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Migrate #Web 1.0 Intranet apps built for Netscape + #Internet Explorer 3 to HTML5, CSS3 & ECMAScript5 for modern #mobile browsers.

The web really exploded in the commercial space during the second half of the 90s. Tim Berners-Lee’s HTML 3.2 specification received W3C recommendation in 1997. Netscape submitted its JavaScript language to ECMA and got its specification published in 1998. Cascading style sheets (CSS) received their first W3C recommendation in 1996. The problem with all of this was that Netscape and Microsoft were in a browser war where both pushed their own standards on web designers and developers to try and gain an edge in the market. In an attempt to avoid incompatibilities between browsers, most websites built in the 90s targeted the lowest common denominator.

Modern mobile browsers can now render the app-like web provided by HTML5, CSS3 and ECMAScript5 (JavaScript). You get all the cross-platform development benefits plus a deployment model that bypasses app stores. This new breed of web app supports offline operation, multithreading, the ability to call web APIs and take data offline via local data stores. Most enterprise solutions require these features and Web 1.0 apps can be migrated to get this functionality.

Since existing HTML 3.2/4.0 still renders properly, just enable the new features of existing HTML tags and add new tags where appropriate. Add new JavaScript functions to empower your web app with modern capabilities. Update and add new CSS to give your web app the look and feel of a native mobile app.

Improve user productivity by delivering the feature-rich HTML5 web apps that modern, mobile browsers are designed to work with. Has your company updated all it’s Intranet web apps from the 1990s yet?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Business Risk by Migrating your Legacy Software to Modern, Secure Platforms and Programming Languages

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Businesses drag their feet when mobilizing line of business #apps via legacy #software migration thinking it’s cheaper to maintain a codebase than to rewrite for #mobile.

I get it. Migrating all those apps to mobile seems like eating the proverbial elephant. They cost a lot of money to build, the highly-skilled developers needed to rewrite the code are harder to find than ever, the code isn’t commented and there aren’t any docs. This often leads to IT decision makers putting off these projects, perhaps until it’s not their problem anymore. So why do it?

For starters, your employees will be significantly more productive running your apps on the mobile devices they actually use. Since work is not a place to go but a thing to do, employees can get their jobs done from anywhere. Millennials won’t be chained to a desk and they’re going to use the devices they like best. Face it, those Win32 apps are never going to run on someone’s iPhone and your new generation of employees haven’t ever heard of Windows 95. Not changing is a non-starter as you’ll just miss out on younger talent entirely.

Another good reason migrate all these apps and systems is because they’re running on outdated hardware and software. It goes without saying that this infrastructure has far surpassed its end of life (EOL) and there is absolutely no support coming from the original vendors of the computers, operating systems, software and development tools. I’m actually not 100% correct on this point. There are some giant technology vendors that charge tens of millions of dollars per year to support old systems that reached EOL without migrating. In the end, migrating is significantly cheaper and it rescues your valuable intellectual property from fragile, unsupported, failing systems.

There’s a more ominous reason to migrate your apps. Most data breaches are due to running unpatched, out-of-date, and therefore unprotected software. This includes:

  • Software written before PCs were pervasively open to Internet attacks.
  • Apps that don’t require authentication.
  • Apps that don’t encrypt data at-rest or data in-transit.
  • Apps written before established secure development lifecycle procedures.
  • Un-patched software.
  • Software oblivious to buffer overflows or SQL injection attacks.
  • Software and services built with the assumption that they would always be “inside the firewall” and therefore protected.
  • Apps that don’t follow “least privilege” principles.
  • Apps that don’t work with modern sandboxed operating systems.

This older and often unattended software is putting your company at risk. Individual and state-sponsored hackers are attacking the software of companies all over the world. Valuable intellectual property and sensitive customer data is being stolen daily. Company executives are getting fired. You absolutely don’t want this to be your priceless intellectual property or your customer data. This is a fast ticket to losing your competitive advantage as well as the trust of your customers. Oh, and you might be looking for a new CEO and CIO.

So what’s the game plan?

  • Catalog all your Win32 and Web 1.0 apps and assemble a v-team to take ownership of them.
  • Send out surveys to all your employees to find out who’s still using which apps.
  • Utilize asset management discovery software that scans the company network searching for apps running on Windows, Macs and servers.
  • Pull the plug on apps that don’t show up in a survey or via asset management scanning.
  • Listen carefully for screaming employees and turn those apps back on. I expect you’ll find a good percentage of those apps aren’t used anymore.
  • Eliminate the next chunk of apps by seeing if employees can use a new or different process to accomplish certain tasks. Your business and processes may have changed so much over the years that some of these apps aren’t relevant.

When rewriting the remaining apps, focus less on the code and more on data sources, workflows, user interfaces, performance and latency. I’ll talk later about new ways to connect to data and build new apps. It’s more important to reverse-engineer the way employees perceive these apps to work than how the existing code actually makes them work. This provides a good opportunity to stealthily update business cases.

Reduce risk to your company by migrating unsafe, unsupported, end of life software to modern, secure platforms and programming languages. How rapidly is your company de-risking its exposure to legacy business applications?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Improve Employee Productivity by Moving your Win32 and Web 1.0 Apps to Mobile

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It’s time to migrate the millions of Win32 and #Web 1.0 apps that currently run global business to #mobile.

Global businesses are run primarily by Windows applications built in the 90s. While apps were created for DOS, the Apple II, OS/2, Sun Workstations, Win16, NeXT, SGI and the Mac in the 80s and early 90s, most were migrated after Windows NT/95 arrived. Y2K taught us COBOL on mainframes are still around. The larger mega-trend stemmed from low-cost PCs coupled to a graphical operating system working with minimal RAM and slow processors. Combined with drag and drop GUI development tools, a perfect storm took over the world of business. The resulting Win32 apps drove a tidal wave of productivity and innovation. Companies still have thousands of them in use today.

Something else happened in the 1990s. A giant network of networks called the Internet, combined with Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, to create the next technology revolution. Web servers arrived and businesses created static web pages to establish a presence on the web and start marketing to customers. The Intranet was born with internal-facing web pages used to disseminate information to employees. Server-side data processing gave rise to Web 1.0 apps that didn’t have to be deployed to employee desktops the way Windows apps did.

The Win32 and Web 1.0 apps are still with us and must urgently evolve to fit in a world where untethered people expect to flexibly work anytime, from anywhere with mobile devices instead of desktops.

Improve user productivity by migrating legacy apps and websites to the mobile devices employees and customers actually use. What is your organization doing to unchain its employees from desktop apps?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click here to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Improve Productivity by Publishing Services to Mobile Employees via a Web Gateway

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Rather than extending your entire #network out to #mobile devices via #VPN, publish individual services through a #web gateway or the #cloud.

Most remote employees gain access to Intranet resources through a virtual private network (VPN). Using 3rd party or built-in software, employees provide credentials and sometimes a smartcard to create a VPN tunnel. Once created, employees can securely exchange data with internal resources. This is anything but seamless and employees find setting up VPN sessions and re-authenticating due to dropped connections to be a hassle. They want to access things the same way they do on the Internet.

Let’s take a look at a better mobile reality. Most companies around the world use Microsoft Exchange for corporate email. For more than a decade, mobile users on virtually every platform have been able to securely sync their email without first creating a cumbersome VPN connection. This was possible because Exchange publishes its Active Sync service through a reverse-proxy over TLS. The email app is responsible for passing credentials to the server. It works the way mobile employees expect all their mobile apps to work.

You can do this too by publishing your internal web sites and REST + JSON APIs on port 443 through a reverse proxy that lives at the network edge. Reverse proxies are appliances or server software that let you create a multi-channel access gateway. Of course, when you move your workloads to the cloud, none of this will be needed anymore.

Improve user productivity by eliminating the need to create cumbersome VPN connections to achieve secure connections. What remote access technology changes are you making at your organization to make life easier for your employees?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!

Reduce Corporate Expenses by Turning your Intranet Inside Out and Sending it to the Cloud

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Seriously, get out of the Intranet business and upload your corporate #apps and #data to the #cloud to better serve your #mobile users.

The advent of local area networks (LANs) and computers acting as server nodes led to the concept of the corporate network. It began with file shares and print servers that everyone on the network could access from their PC. Over time, these servers became adept at running their own applications which took us to the client/server era. When the web exploded in the mid-1990s, these computers hosted web servers and a private version of the Internet was born called the Intranet. Since then, most companies have built out hundreds of internal web sites and portals to serve the needs of their employees. As employees became more mobile, secure remote access technologies were created to allow them to get inside. It’s time to turn things inside out.

Today, your trusted corporate network secured by perimeter devices such as firewalls is no more secure than the cloud. In the cloud, corporate data and applications can be accessed from anywhere on any device based on an employee’s identity. Multifactor authentication against cloud directories layered with secured connections and devices grants employees fine-grained access to different enterprise resources. Along the way it eliminates conventional virtual private network connections into the corporate network. Cloud storage, RAM, and CPU can drive enterprise workloads that would be cost prohibitive and slow to provision on-premises. Purchasing, provisioning, maintaining and securing an Intranet is a thing of the past.

Reduce risk and cut expenses by moving Intranet assets to a secure cloud you no longer have to manage yourself. How much progress has your organization made in migrating to the cloud?

Learn how to digitally transform your company in my newest book, “Mobile Strategies for Business: 50 Actionable Insights to Digitally Transform your Business.”

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Click to purchase a copy of my book today and start transforming your business!