In April 2005, CFO Research Services (a unit of CFO Publishing Corp.) launched a research program to study finance's perception of the cost of enabling mobile workers to access critical business information. In particular, we were interested in exploring the differences between finance's perception of the cost of remote access, and the perception of their counterparts in IT.
Through this research program, we sought to learn how finance executives perceived the importance of mobile work, and their priorities when evaluating remote access offerings, with a particular focus on finance's approach to the issue of remote access costs. We sought to discover not only finance's priorities in measuring and controlling the cost of enabling mobile workers, but also how finance gathers information about these costs, and how their view into remote access spending differs from that of their IT peers.
To explore this topic, we surveyed finance and IT executives and conducted several interviews with leading executives in the manufacturing, health care, high tech, and professional services industries. We gathered 92 responses from readers of CFO magazine, and 28 responses through a supplemental list of IT executives provided by Fiberlink Communications Corp., the sponsor of this report.
This report presents the findings of the research program.
Finance and IT's Views on the Cost of Mobile Working
These results reveal a serious disconnection between finance's desire for more complete information about remote access spending and IT's perception that finance already has adequate information. This finding is reinforced by another divergence between the two groups. Although finance and IT respondents agree that difficulty connecting is the most significant problem with remote access at their companies, the two groups sharply disagree about the significance of the difference in priorities between IT and finance (i.e., IT is concerned with security, while finance is concerned with cost). Forty-two percent of finance executives said that this difference between finance and IT's priorities is a significant problem at their companies. But only 13 percent of IT executives identified this difference in priorities as a significant problem.
It should be noted that finance executives from companies with more than 1,000 mobile workers are much more likely than their peers in the population as a whole to gather information about remote access costs from IT (71 percen versus 49 percent the adequacy of finance's information on the cost of of the population as a whole).
SPONSOR'S PERSPECTIVE
Your customers no longer have to decide between increasing the productivity of their mobile workforce and having control over security and cost. With Fiberlink, they get both.
As a leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for four consecutive years, Fiberlink has long been recognized as a leader in providing mobile and remote connectivity for global companies. The company has achieved equally strong recognition for its leadership in securing the "mobile perimeter" of the network. The Yankee Group has credited Fiberlink as the first to go to market with solutions that address what they call "Remote Endpoint Security" and has unlocked new demand through an innovative approach to security.
Fiberlink works with its customers - comprised of over 500 global enterprises such as Continental Airlines, Grant Thornton, and Targus Group International - to address this tension of opposites. We help our customers regain control over their distributed workforce and not fall victim to the challenges associated with enabling their workers to be productive anytime and anywhere they choose to do their work. Our leading mobile workforce solutions go beyond basic network connectivity, offering customers a way to ensure compliance before users can connect to a company's network. In short, our customers no longer have to decide between increasing the productivity of their mobile workforce and having control over security and cost. With Fiberlink, they get both.
