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Productivity or Pain
Measuring the value of mobile investment
Time pressures on businesses and employees continue to mount. Increasing regulation, traveling and resource limitations compel many to work longer hours. For many roles, productivity is difficult to measure, so improvements might not be as simple as making a greater number of appointments, but making more beneficial decisions. A better understanding of whether productivity has been improved might be gained from assessing whether an individual employee has more control over managing their time, or if wasted gaps can be filled with useful activity. Technology can rarely increase productivity by itself, but gives the individual employee the means to increase it themselves, if they are sufficiently committed and willing to do so.
KEY FINDINGS
- White collar mobile application deployment leads blue collar, moving beyond simply mobile email
Almost 80% of enterprises are deploying mobile productivity applications for professional or white collar employees, and less than half are doing so for blue collar workers. Of those deploying to professionals however only a third are limited to mobile email, the remainder a mix of applications including mobile email.
- Formal measurement of productivity gains prevail ? smaller enterprises lead the way
Over 50% of companies are using a formal process to measure productivity rather than ad hoc or informal checking. This is more prevalent in smaller enterprises, where the impact of a bad decision is more noticeable in the business. Smaller enterprises are also more cautious of the value of mobile data access, but almost 90% believe it adds to some extent to improvements in employee productivity.
- Productivity comes from users taking control, but they can be distracted
Over three quarters of enterprises believe that employee control of their own time is beneficial to their personal productivity, but a similar number admit that distractions caused by employees fiddling with their mobile device reduces this benefit. There is also the danger that employees resent having to take work home with them as they already believe they are working longer hours.
- Users are not sufficiently involved in the process of selecting mobile solutions, which is still too IT led
Despite the high level of importance of user acceptance in wireless remote access projects, over 80% of enterprises are not influenced by end users when selecting specific solutions or products, such as applciations or handsets. Line of business and facilities or operations management have significant secondary influence, but the primary influence is first with board level, then IT management.
- The business would welcome wider mobile deployment, but IT management is less sure
The challenges of wider deployment are often first felt by those having to provide support and management, IT managers are marginally less confident than business management about the level of improvement coming from giving more employees wireless or remote access. Almost a quarter of business managers believe a great deal is there to be gained, despite concerns noted above.
Measuring the value of any investment at a given point in time is always difficult. Knowing what to measure is even harder. In theory it is a simple equation for any business ? return over cost ? but not all costs or returns are easy to quantify. The tangible gains may be elusive, and there are rarely any rigorous frameworks for measuring intangible benefits, such as boosted employee morale, external goodwill, brand value or even customer satisfaction.
Technology benefits often fall into the category of difficult to measure, but the costs of hardware, software and services are often of such a magnitude that the benefits need to be tangible to justify the cost.
This report looks at the value of wireless or remote access in improving productivity for small, medium and large enterprises. As background to this, 150 UK based business and IT managers were interviewed.
The report examines the productivity challenges of mobile technology, and is intended to be read by those with responsibility for sourcing mobile technologies and dealing with mobile suppliers. It offers them a peer review and information for their internal discussions and negotiations with suppliers.
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