One part of my role here at BTC is to keep tabs on the pulse of the Enterprise Mobility market.That involves understanding the new technology trends, product directions and investment trends as they relate to adoption of mobility in organizations.Mobility is a complex marketplace where companies have to face rapid technological advances, difficulty in understanding use cases for Enterprise mobile apps beyond the obvious, somewhat baffling (at least at first) but very clever partnerships such as IBM and Apple as well as ever evolving regulatory environment.And these are just few of the many factors that play into decisions around Enterprise Mobility initiatives in companies.I recently came across some fascinating finding in a survey conducted by ‘Enterprise Mobility Exchange’ about the state of the Enterprise Mobility in 2015 and beyond.

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Here are some of those findings:

  • Only 35.7% of respondent companies are beyond the early implementation phase in their mobility journey.This talks to still maturing nature of the market place and also the difficulty companies face to start and gain traction.
  • Majority of companies reported the move of their mobility programs from reactive to strategic underscoring the need for any new mobility initiatives to be strategic to their businesses.
  • Companies are finally moving beyond BYOD and device management to focus on applications and content that employees have access to on those devices. This as use cases come into focus around boosting employee productivity through use of mobile applications.
  • Usability of mobile applications is certainly gaining more focus with consistency of user experience across multiple applications being cited as equally important as ease of use.
  • 62.5% of companies include mobile applications as major investment area within Enterprise Mobility, an increase of 18.5% over last year thus giving credence to the fact that the focus is shifting from device management to applications on those devices.
  • Increase in productivity and profitability were the main drivers behind the mobile investments by a wide margin – not a big surprise but what is interesting is that the focus on these two factors was also borne out when asked about tangible benefits seen from mobility initiatives already completed.
  • Integration with legacy systems was cited as the biggest challenge to implementing mobile programs only slightly ahead of stakeholder buy-in.

And lastly here are a few of the lessons companies have learnt when implementing Enterprise Mobility

  • Integration with legacy applications takes significant dedicated efforts.
  • It’s important to have measured rollouts and keep the focus on business benefits.
  •  Start with small scale implementation and engage the business early and often to ensure stakeholder buy-in and increase adoption.
  •  Let experts run the Mobility programs – not IT.

How closely do your experiences align with these finding in your own Enterprise Mobility journey? I would love to find out.

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