New for this year in the Stratix Enterprise Mobility Outlook is our Mobile-First Score, which looks at how organizations rank on a series of questions designed to dig into their mobile-driven digital transformation progress. We assessed an enterprise's total "score" and then normalized the distribution across low, medium, and high (see figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1: Mobile-first Score
While more than half describe themselves as mobile-first, and another 41 percent as somewhat mobile-first, only 29 percent have a high Mobile-First Score, and 41 percent come in at medium.
The gap between the self-perception and the Mobile-First Score shows that a majority of organizations aren't fully leveraging mobile-first principles that put mobility at the heart of strategy, operations, and user experiences. The benefits include higher productivity, increased efficiency, nimbleness, happy end users, and delighted customers. Organizations that have embraced the philosophy stand out in three key areas:
1. Mobile is Central to Strategic Decision-Making Thinking about how IT solutions fit into the mobile environment should be a key consideration in decision-making. That decision-making should be centralized so that leaders can leverage a holistic view of the entire organization to see where there are opportunities for scale, potential savings, and increased efficiency. The percentage of total IT spend on mobile helps show the level of commitment to mobile-first solutions.
2. The Organization Has a Comprehensive Understanding of its Mobile Environment Another key component of being mobile-first is how well organizations comprehend their mobile environment at a holistic level so they can proactively manage it, track device inventories/status, and forecast future needs. Without that big-picture strategy, there can be security breakdowns, inefficient change management, poor ROI because of a lack of visibility/accountability, and incorrect forecasting of future needs.
3. Proactive Digital Transformation Mobile-first organizations proactively and thoughtfully examine workflows and existing technology for opportunities to improve. That can be migrating workflows to mobile, making legacy data and applications available from anywhere and any device, or increasing the number of employees using mobile when it can improve their productivity and user experiences.
To rank participants on our Mobile-First Scale, we looked at the progress organizations have made towards adopting its fundamental tenets.
Figure 2.2: How Embedded Mobile Management is in Strategy and Decision-Making
1. Centralized Decision Making on Mobile Management The data shows that while organizations reported mobile management is widespread, it's almost all decentralized or done within business units instead of centralized across the organization (see figure 2.2).
Without a centralized strategy for mobile, organizations are missing strategic opportunities around scale, such as cost savings when similar devices can be used for multiple workflows—or volume discounts when buying for multiple business units simultaneously. There are additional advantages of being able to save in soft cost areas as well—such as employee training time, smaller spare pools, simplified management, security, and pushing out updates.
The amount spent on mobile is also a leading indicator of the importance and focus of the overall mobile-first strategy. Ideally, it should be a reflection of the percentage of employees that rely on mobile to do their job and the number of workflows that are embedded on mobile—but here's where we see some misalignment in our survey responses (see figure 2.3).
Figure 2.3
2. Comprehensive Understanding of the Mobile Environment Organizations use a patchwork of platforms to manage their mobile environments, which can hamper their ability to get the holistic view they need to craft the best strategies.
The report found most organizations are leveraging automation to enroll, manage, and protect devices (see figure 2.4).
But while the vast majority of organizations are using endpoint management solutions, over 30 percent still struggle with multiple platforms and other inefficiencies. As most Enterprise Mobility Management platforms give you the ability to administer any endpoint from one solution, doing it on multiple platforms is a lost opportunity for security gains along with increased efficiency and improved change management.
Eighty-eight percent of organizations report that they can track and monitor their mobile device inventory, but their tools, automation, and analytics capabilities are much less clear. You can see that in the data when they report an inability to forecast their needs for new devices and device repairs for the coming year. If organizations truly could look at their device performance and analyze and track in real-time with automated asset management tools, these numbers should all align. It's an opportunity for organizations to get significantly better at managing their mobile environments.
3. Proactive Digital Transformation The survey also looks at how organizations are evolving and pivoting to mobile solutions to improve productivity and user experiences. Very few give the majority (75% or more) of their employees a mobile device to do their job (see figure 2.5).
Only a quarter of organizations have enabled their workers to access all the things they need to do their jobs from anywhere and any device (see figure 2.6).
That number is even worse if you look at legacy data, which has long been a challenge in digital transformation. Only 12 percent of employees can access what they need on mobile devices. If a worker has good mobile tools in some areas but routinely has to go back to a desktop to use a siloed legacy application for other workflows, that's a significant problem (see figure 2.7).
Perhaps more significant in terms of the mobile-first evolution is how actual business process enhancements are lagging—and that could be the key to why more of the workforce is not 100 percent mobile. Very few organizations have migrated their workflows to mobile in the last three years. When you consider that in the context of the pandemic and the significant shift to remote operations, it's a surprising statistic (see figure 2.8).
It's expected that field services would rank high on mobile-first because you have to be mobile to be in the field. While retail has rolled out mobile solutions for inventory control, buy-online pickup-in-store, and some point of sale, it still relies on many legacy applications, and their strategies haven't quite reached the organizational level.
Clearly, our respondents—on the whole—are more likely to describe themselves as mobile-first than they truly are, and that's likely a self-serving bias. Rather than an equally distributed curve, 53 percent say they consider themselves Mobile-First when, in actuality, only 29 percent are (see figure 2.9).
Figure 2.9: Mobile-First Self Perception
Figure 2.10: Mobile Score Vs. “Mobile-First”
When we compare the self-assessment with the actual score on an individual level, it's apparent that organizations who are low on the self-assessment are much more likely to be accurate than those who are medium. The least likely to be right are the high scores (see figure 2.10).
Retail organizations are significantly less likely to describe themselves as mobile-first than field services, manufacturing, or transportation (see figure (2.11).
Figure 2.11: Self-Assessment Breakdown by Industry
Of the four groups, field services has significantly higher Mobile-First Scores than manufacturing, retail, and transportation (see figure 2.12).
Figure 2.12 Mobile-First Score Industry
As digital transformation accelerates across industries and mobile devices become more diverse and essential to operations, organizations need holistic strategies and centralized decision-making to ensure mobility solutions work well and deliver on the expected ROI. With the exponentially higher number of use cases coming with 5G, it's more important than ever.
The Stratix Mobile-First Score vs. the self-evaluation in the survey reveals that organizations might think they're moving in the right direction, but they're not moving fast enough.
