One of the biggest recent shifts in technology is that the consumer has become the prime driver for much of the innovation, with businesses either being secondary beneficiaries or rapidly dealing with consumer-focused solutions championed by the users. Nowhere is this more evident than with mobility, and CompTIA’s Second Annual Trends in Enterprise Mobility study sheds some light on this dynamic space.
One of the primary implications of enterprise mobility is that IT professionals can no longer exercise the same degree of control over the full system. With devices that serve both business and personal needs along with applications delivered through the cloud, new questions must be asked and answered before a company can have a fully functional mobility strategy.
For now, many of those questions are focused at the device level, especially as employees are pushing to use their own devices rather than simply accepting what the company provides. Sixty-four percent of companies allow or mandate individual-liable devices, with most stating that improving productivity is the main driver.
However, companies are finding that choosing a device strategy is simply the first of many steps. As employees bring their own device, they also want to bring their own applications and services. As a result, the field of mobile device management (MDM) is rapidly shifting to include mobile application management (MAM). Additionally, with Forrester reporting that 66 percent of employees use two or more devices at work, integration is becoming critical in order to provide a consistent user experience. Companies are pursuing a range of solutions, including exploring and implementing virtual desktops (49 percent), building custom mobile apps for business systems (29 percent) and moving business applications to a cloud model that can be accessed through a browser (28 percent).
As companies continue to mature in their approach to mobility, they will eventually come to realize that some amount of restructuring must occur for optimal use. Looking two years into the future, there is currently little difference from the current perception of workforce compute needs or company-provided hardware bundles. As firms become more proactive, though, they will first build out the proper workflow based on the available technology, then determine compute needs and distribute devices. Managing enterprise mobility is currently a large challenge, and there will continue to be significant opportunity as a new phase of adoption begins.
CompTIA’s Second Annual Trends in Enterprise Mobility study was developed with input from a survey of 502 IT and business executives in the U.S. during February 2013. The full report is available at no cost to CompTIA members. Visit CompTIA.org or contact research@comptia.org for details.
