Organizations continue to need to provide more personalized products and services to an increasingly geographically diverse customer base. Aberdeen hypothesized that this pressure requires organizations to develop and deploy solutions to empower their heavily traveling workers to be as productive and efficient on the road as they would be in the office. The results are in – enterprise mobility is significantly helping improve the productivity of Road Warriors.
Best in Class Performance Aberdeen used three key criteria to distinguish best-in-class companies. These key performance indicators (KPIs) are: workflow improvement from the use of mobile devices; relative effectiveness as compared to fixed office counterparts; and improvement in the productivity of their mobile workforce over the last two years. Best-in-class organizations showed stronger performance in all three areas, as compared to all other organizations. In fact: - Best-in-class organizations are “Very Highly” satisfied with the productivity of their road warriors twice as frequently as all other organizations; - Best-in-class organizations rate their mobile workforce to be 50% more productive than those of all other organizations; - Best-in-class organizations have increased their investment in enterprise mobility 30% more aggressively over the last two years as compared to all other organizations.
Competitive Maturity Assessment Survey results show that the firms enjoying best-in-class performance shared several common characteristics with respect to their support for their road warriors, such as: - Best-in-class organizations are over six times more likely to have some form of measurement in place to determine how productive their road warriors are; - Road warriors at best-in-class organizations rate the quality of their tech support as “very high” three times more frequently than the industry average.
Required Actions In addition to the specific recommendations in chapter 3 of this report, to achieve best-inclass performance, organizations must: - Develop formal strategic processes around planning, purchasing, deploying and supporting your road warriors; - Work with partner technology vendors and wireless carriers to ensure that road warriors are able to connect effortlessly to both wireless networks and VPNs.
Aberdeen’s November 2006 benchmark report Enterprise Mobile Adoption: a Corporate Conundrum, showed that within the next 12 months, mobile workers will account for 47% of the workforce of a typical organization. Additionally, these organizations reported that they expect monthly mobile spending per mobile worker to increase by 20% in the same time period. Given that, Aberdeen’s latest research shows that organizations consider 30% of their employees to be road warriors (i.e.: those who spend more than 25% of their time out of the office), it is apparent that as white-collar employees are becoming more mobile, productivity and effectiveness while away from their offices is becoming of critical importance. The biggest challenge is aligning business processes and technology deployments. Take for example a U.S. based $600m global insurance brokerage and risk management services firm that arms its road warriors with PDAs and global connectivity services. Their mobile workers are not hindered by any business or technology bottlenecks. Aberdeen’s latest research shows that the two greatest pressures that organizations currently face are the ability to maintain a certain level of customer service regardless of where employees are (59% of respondents) and keeping road warriors efficient at all times (53% of respondents). An important question must be asked: When 29% of all organizations surveyed do not measure and an additional 28% don’t know the productivity gains associated from mobility, does mobility improve that road warrior’s productivity? Specifically is mobility delivering on its promise of consistent productivity levels no matter where employees are?
Maturity Class Framework The value of mobility solutions is tied to the results they deliver. Aberdeen used three key performance criteria to distinguish Best-in- Class companies from Industry Average and Laggard organizations. These key performance indicators (KPIs) are: past and present business workflow improvements, the relative productivity of road warriors as compared to office dwellers and the efficacy of the support services for road warriors. Table 1 summarizes the findings and defines “best-in-class performance” for this study.
