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Today’s business demands of working 24/7 around the globe has placed a greater emphasis than ever on mobile applications. Wireless emails are just the beginning of the opportunities that exist for companies looking to extend the reach of their workforce, provide true collaboration, and ensure real-time data flow away from the confines of the office.
Leading organizations are beginning to leverage the power of smart phones, PDAs and convergence devices along with appropriately designed software solutions, to help them increase revenues, profits, and improve operational efficiencies.
As both companies and their employees continue to invest in wireless and mobile devices, thus leveraging the newfound capabilities of these devices, a new challenge is emerging in terms of how organizations manage the use of these devices and the underlying network and data resources they are using and accessing.
Companies are now facing new challenges in terms of managing the costs of these devices; selecting the functional tasks that should be mobilized, as well as how to support and manage the security implications of proprietary information being accessed and used “in the wild.”
While the importance of developing a formal wireless strategy is clear to some businesses, many companies have been slow to act. In fact, 17% of respondents report that their companies had no completed or planned wireless adoption plans, while an additional 23% have not yet begun to implement a mobile strategy, but plan to do so within the next 12 months. With 40% of organizations stating they do not yet have a formal mobile strategy implemented, and the balance largely having only an early iteration of a strategy, what are the key challenges preventing organizations from implementing formal guidelines and policies?
Figure 3 shows in fact that the number one reason given for not developing a strategy is an unproven business case. Seventy-two percent of companies who stated they have no plans to develop a strategy (and 63% of those planning to develop one within 12 months) state that developing a mobile strategy has yet to prove its business value. This statistic should in fact be considered a call-to action in terms of both wireless and mobile vendors as well as companies who have developed best-in-class solutions to demonstrate the value that these solutions can provide. Aberdeen findings suggest that wireless carriers have an opportunity to not only show the value that these solutions can provide, but additionally that they are no longer cost prohibitive or overly complex. These findings are a result of the fact that service access cost was the second most commonly given response for why companies with no planned mobile strategy were not implementing mobile/ wireless solutions.
While almost 40% of survey respondents had stated they did not have any current mobile strategy in place, the remaining 60% gave many reasons regarding what was driving their mobile strategy adoption. Not surprisingly, most reasons given revolved around driving continuous communications and collaboration, both with customers/prospects and colleagues. Seventy-four percent of respondents stated that the ability to respond to customer needs more quickly was the most important factor driving the development of a mobile strategy.
Challenges and Responses
As the number one stated challenge in developing a mobile strategy was justifying the operational costs, a majority of companies in the survey chose to begin with a test solution. While 75% of organizations surveyed began with a test solution, almost two-thirds had no business case checklist to justify the implementation, suggesting an almost “adhoc” approach. Additionally more than three in four organizations neither had a measurement plan in place to quantify the benefits of having implemented a solution, nor did they hire a mobility consultant who could share best practices in justifying the value of a mobile solution or methodologies in terms of how to maximize the benefits of leveraging the technology investments.
This “ad-hoc” approach should be of concern to organizations looking to develop best-in-class mobile strategies. Any IT project should have a clearly articulated scope that tangibly addresses key business pain points and should most importantly have built-in metrics in order to measure the impact that the mobile initiative had on the business challenge.
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