If one were to consider a single word that epitomizes the relentless onslaught of technological evolution in the past decade, it would likely be “disruption”. Any industry that thought itself immune to the perils of digital disruption quickly found itself in turmoil. Travel agents were displaced by aggregating sites such as Travelocity and Expedia. Transportation services like Uber, Lyft and car subscriptions are changing the way millennials view car ownership entirely. The hotel industry is struggling to cope with the widespread proliferation of Airbnb. Amazon.com has disrupted established players in a number of industry verticals ranging from book publishing to grocery retailers.
Mobile technology itself was completely disrupted with the 2007 arrival of the iPhone. While Apple was infamously dismissed by smartphone industry leaders of the time such as Palm, Blackberry and Microsoft, it now holds a commanding lead in smartphones, tablets and wearables. Meanwhile, those three leaders are now relative non-entities in the mobile space –in just over a decade.
Figure 1: Desktop vs Mobile vs Tablet Market Share North America
The specter of seemingly stable and dominant players being consigned to the scrapheap of business history looms large over IT leaders and decision makers. In a recent Forbes Insights/Treasure Data survey, 51% of executives indicated a high level of risk to their organization over just the next five years from technology-driven disruption.
The more telling statistic from that survey is that a whopping 83% of executives who see their organizations as market disruptors report increased revenue over the past three fiscal years. Meanwhile, just 54% of executives leading in non-disruptive enterprises report similar growth.
We set out to determine what technology IT decision makers were using and planning to use in the coming decade. More importantly, we sought to identify what had made them successful in their tech deployments and assess why those strategies make some organizations more prepared for tech-led disruption than others.
We surveyed hundreds of mobility decision makers, and what we found was not only interesting, but also very informative for decision makers assessing their current state of readiness for tech disruption.
