Infotech Lead America: According to the Accenture 2013 CIO Mobility Survey, a majority of CIOs worldwide (79 percent) believe that mobility is an important factor that generates significant sources of new revenue for their businesses.
Most CIOs were ready to invest 31 – 40 percent of their discretionary budgets to achieve that goal, as compared to only 19 percent of CIOs surveyed last year.
Respondents said mobility improves customer interactions (84 percent) and their business (83 percent). More than one-third (34 percent) of CIOs said mobility is a top priority in the coming year. 42 percent of CIOs ranked mobility as one of their top five priorities.
Survey respondents indicated that improving field and customer service with instant data access, capture and processing topped the list of needs (43 percent). Engaging customers via mobile devices (36 percent), especially with transactions on mobile devices (34 percent) was indicated as another top need. Twenty-nine percent of all respondents plan to design, develop and/or distribute connected devices to support B2B applications.
Nearly half (46 percent) of CIOs said they plan to make workflow changes over the next year for better incorporation of mobility into the business. 73 percent think mobility will impact their business as much or more than the web revolution of the late 90s, compared to 67 percent who felt this way in a similar Accenture survey conducted last year.
More than half of the companies surveyed (58 percent) have a moderately developed formal mobile strategy. About one-quarter (23 percent) have an extensively-developed formal mobile strategy, down from 31 percent from last year.
Countrywise, China (50 percent), Italy (47 percent) and Brazil (37 percent) lead the way globally with extensively-developed mobile strategies. Half (50 percent) of the companies surveyed said they would identify prioritized mobility initiatives over the next year, as compared to last year (41 percent). Nearly all said their mobile strategies must support smartphones (85 percent) and tablets (78 percent), acknowledging the increase in employees’ use of their own tablets for work, and companies’ deployment of tablets as work devices.
The survey further found that mobile device management (27 percent), collaboration (25 percent) and knowledge sharing (23 percent) are the top three most important features to a developed mobile strategy. When participants were asked about their top two priorities, China (53 percent), Italy (53 percent) and India (50 percent) tagged mobility as one of their top two focus areas. The United Kingdom (67 percent), Japan (57 percent), and France (52 percent) ranked mobility as one of their top five IT priorities.
Most respondents in India (77 percent), and almost half (47 percent) of respondents in Japan, Mexico, and the United Kingdom plan to focus on improving field and customer service delivery with instant data access, capture and processing. In consumer-related mobility priorities, 63 percent of respondents in India and the United Kingdom cited driving revenue through transactions on mobile devices within their top priorities, followed by the United States (36 percent).
The study found that security (45 percent), budget concerns (41 percent) and lack of interoperability with legacy systems (31 percent) are the main barriers cited by companies as impacting their mobile priorities.
More than half of the enterprises surveyed (59 percent) provide only limited support relating to BYOD to their employees while about one-quarter (28 percent) offer full support.
All respondents in the automotive, insurance, and health care sectors plan to reach their top mobile priorities within the next year. For the automotive industry, the most important feature to its strategy is payments and commerce (54 percent), while the insurance industry respondents cited location-based services (48 percent) as most important, as did health care providers (46 percent). Communications companies cited M2M as a mobile priority, with sixty-seven percent saying they would execute M2M communications in their organization within the next year.
The electronics (52 percent) and technology industries (47 percent) placed mobility as one of their top two priorities. More than half (57 percent) of the aerospace industry cited mobility as one of its top five priorities. Consumer firms cited driving revenue through customer engagement among their highest mobile priorities (45 percent) with the retail segment the highest at 59 percent.
