As enterprises face a fundamentally changed landscape in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become clear that operational flexibility has and will be going forward a deciding factor in organizational success. Mobile technology-led programs have emerged as a key component in the pivot that businesses have had to execute in this “new normal” across several industries. In fact, there is a “digital divide” emerging between agile organizations with the mobile technology capabilities to adapt and thrive and those who have yet to whole-heartedly prioritize and invest in effective mobile technology device and service portfolios for their frontline workforces.
To better understand the stark choices that these organizations face and how it informs their operational decisions, VDC Research, an enterprise mobile technology market research authority, has tapped prominent IT decision makers across a number of varyingly impacted verticals. The objective was to better understand how they adapted their technology programs to rapid disruption due to the pandemic and to understand the impact of these changes on their investment and larger strategic initiatives for their mobile/frontline workforces.
The survey responses we’ll discuss in this paper come from 250 qualified IT decision makers across the following industries:
Delving further into the makeup of these companies, we find a mix of mid-size and large enterprise clients with a mean of 5,797 employees among them. In total, 69% of the participants were responsible for setting their enterprise’s IT strategy, and the group was comprised of a representative mix of operations, IT and executive management roles:
In terms of the sizes of the companies they represent, the breakdown is as follows:
In comparison to our 2020 pre-disruption baseline and cohort identification purposes, we classified participants into these three categories of technology adoption:
Survey respondents are largely not new to mobile, and thus it was expected they have a higher than normal percentage of Innovators. Accordingly, their usage of mobile technology devices and services is high as 79.6% use some outsourced Mobile Managed Services (MMS) today, and 68.8% reported some or all their frontline workers use enterprise-issued mobile devices.
This year’s survey showed that few organizations were able to effectively pivot and adapt in the wake of the pandemic’s unprecedented disruption. In fact, only those already ahead of the curve on IT investments were able to continue operating normally. Consequently, those same innovative organizations are now most aggressively expanding their mobile technology investments and capabilities in response to COVID-19. This leaves the trailing majority of businesses most impacted by the pandemic in dire need of establishing their own “new normal” of baseline mobile technologies to empower them with the flexibility necessary to remain productive and competitive.
There simply is no other way to bridge this emerging enterprise “digital divide”, there must be an enterprise wide adoption of mobile transformation to adjust effectively in the new normal and maintain the safety and productivity of their workforces.
