Security needs to be designed in from the beginning, not added later as an afterthought. 

That's nearly a cliche, and I for that reason, I almost didn't add that comment here. But it seems like many people still don't get that. So it bears repeating. 

I think in business too we should finally make the switch to where instead of sitting a new employee down at a cubicle, we hand them a phablet and say, go to work!

So that means we have an asymmetric producer/consumer view of devices.  Programmers and content creators can have "studios" with advanced goodies.  Consumers, who are still really participants, use the interactive, but simplified, social media formats for business communciations, but can do so everywhere.

The corporate campus then becomes a Disneyland.  A place where you can move about with your mobile device and find and interact with other people and recreate to get ideas.

Quite simply, this is the year "mobile," will move from one category to several.  Tablet and smartphone statistics often are lumped together and need to be separated.  And, rendering items on a tablet need to be different than on a smartphone.

"Mobile" websites are so 2011 :-)  Pervasive websites, customized on the fly to the device--that's the ticket.  And, that's customized in rendering, not content.  

Visitors want the same content in the same way, regardless of device.  If I go to the baseball page on Yahoo, for instance, I can see the Royals' score.  If I go to the mobile version, I have to scroll through 10 screens to get to it, taking more than two minutes.  That's the fallout of "mobile," websites.

I set up my 32" LCD TV to be one of the screens I use for web browsing and use browser zoom to increase the text size.

Let me tell you, you'd be surprised at the number of pages that render into an unintelligible or unusable fashion.   Those menu bars at the bottom that are popular now, or even some jQuery menus.  For some reason, designers still like to use absolute sizes on some elements so pages cannot be scaled by users!

It took me a while to get sites like Netflix into shape where I could select movies, from a distance.  But I think, should it be this hard?   Seems like the whole "browser frame" concept is reaching it's limit.  I mean, what is a webpage now but a collection of objects and text areas.   We should be able to have these things indepedently size appropriately...maybe even message to each other.

So there would be an overall area to play with, based on hardware.  Then the menu bar would say, "hey, I'm grabbing 10% at the bottom".  "Ok, says the 1st column, I'm resizing my graphic and taking 20% on the left".  And so on.  Knowledge rules based on human design consideration act as constraints across the elements.

Christine, I could not agree more with your statement:

I don't understand how anyone can not consider security. With all the regulations in place, plus reports of hackers snagging sensitive data, it makes sense to put security and compliance at the forefront of any effort, particularly when you're looking at any kind of cloud-based solution.

Managing one's data, information channel, and overall information network will be key.  Many have relied on the controls of what they owned, now where there are more options, the organization will be responsible for building their own security.

Note:  For that reason, I would also question sending out bills on Facebook!

Good info.

DHagar

As to the need to display content on mobile devices of varying sizes: I know web designers tout dynamic web design as a way to solve this problem; web pages resize themselves automatically based on the size of the device displaying content. That's the theory; I don't know how well it works in real life. 

In an article I recently put together, that is likely to tear a big hole in "The Cloud" -- Cloud services: The threat of side channels.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/security/cloud-services-the-threat-of-side-channels/8798?tag=content;blog-list-river

Yes, definitely get the legal department involved! Map out what your litigation hold strategy will be, at the very least, and find out what requirements there are for producing documents. 

Organizations must also consider ediscovery as part of ECM. This is going to become a bigger and bigger issue for companies and it won't go away. If you're revamping or implementing an entirely new ECM solution, this is a great opportunity to figure out ediscovery with the least amount of pain, I'd think.

Michael, I don't understand how anyone can not consider security. With all the regulations in place, plus reports of hackers snagging sensitive data, it makes sense to put security and compliance at the forefront of any effort, particularly when you're looking at any kind of cloud-based solution.