90 percent of enterprises surveyed are willing to sustain or increase their investments in mobile technologies over the next 12-18 months, according to an IBM survey.
One of the reasons for increased investments is the measurable impact on speed and productivity. Half of the respondents report a greater than 10 percent gain in employee productivity as a result of their mobile efforts.
While many companies are using mobile to pursue multiple innovation paths, the majority of leaders (62 percent) focus on using mobile for enterprise model innovation – which means redefining their role in the value chain, where they collaborate and how they operate, said IBM survey that covered more than 600 survey participants in 29 countries and eight industries.
While only 20 percent of organizations believe they have a superior or leading mobile strategy compared with their industry peers, more than double that amount (44 percent) anticipate their mobility strategy to be ahead of their peers in the next three years.
Mobile leaders are making investments in bring your own device (BYOD) strategies. While leaders are more than twice as likely to have adopted a BYOD approach for employees compared to other organizations (66 percent compared to 32 percent), leaders are also more likely to provide the needed support to make these programs successful including well-documented policies and IT support.
According to the IBM report, the top three mobile challenges facing organizations are:
* Integrating mobile apps with existing systems (54 percent)
* Implementing end-to-end mobile security solutions for devices and apps (53 percent)
* Reacting to changes in technology and mobile devices in a reasonable period of time (51 percent)
Roughly 70 percent or more of leaders surveyed describe themselves as effective in areas such as addressing structured and unstructured mobile data, handling large volumes of data, analyzing mobile data and taking action based on that data. Less than 37 percent of non-leaders are equipped to deal with these issues.
58 percent of all respondents report that a key benefit of using mobile to improve employee productivity is faster customer response time. In addition to focusing on expanding their network infrastructure, 78 percent of leaders (versus 44 percent of non-leaders) are planning to increase their investment in an employee’s ability to work outside the office.
Of mobile leaders, 70 percent or more have been successful in ensuring interoperability with other systems, leveraging APIs for external or cloud-provided data services, and providing service-oriented architecture and sharing information among systems/devices.
Mobile strategy leaders recognize the importance of making mobile capabilities secure with 79 percent reporting that their organizations have well-documented policies in place for employees using mobile devices (versus 48 percent of non-leaders). Overall, leaders are more effective at addressing mobile security issues, prioritizing around protection of data, secure connectivity and device management among other areas.
51 percent of banking organizations report measurable ROI from their mobile initiatives, compared to 34 percent of their peers. In terms of increasing employee productivity in the field, a few areas where banking organizations stand apart from peers is their emphasis on using mobile to improve internal collaboration, provide sales force enablement tools and enable employee self service.
Compared to mobile leaders, banking organizations have improvements to make when it comes to BYOD adoption. Findings showed that 37 percent of banking respondents say their organization has adopted a BYOD approach, compared to 66 percent of leaders that have implemented BYOD.