Mobility as a Strategic Support for Business Transformation (2016 – present)
Unlike the previous era, when mobile success was defined in the tactical terms of completed deployments and satisfied users, mobile began morphing into a strategic asset capable of enabling business transformation in the third era.
Beginning in 2016, enterprise mobile began to replace the siloed approach that dominated previously with scalable, enterprise-wide deployments becoming the norm. Mobile began to be valued as a transformative catalyst for business. Enterprises combined mobile assets with cloud-based applications and business intelligence tools to pull from mobility previously hidden business insights.
1. Faster refreshes: In consumer mobile, users expect to see significant advances every 1 to 2 years, and they upgrade their personal devices accordingly. Enterprise users now expect the same – even as Finance Departments struggle against declining device values. As a result, pressure is building to find new, innovative ways to finance mobile devices with guaranteed technology refreshes every 12 to 18 months.
2. Number and type of connected devices per user jumps by as much as 580%: Knowledge workers and front-line personnel, familiar with the convenience of phones, tablets and rugged devices, are taking a “more is more” approach to mobile. Today, the number of devices per employee is growing and the types of devices are expanding as well. Thanks to smart phones, convertible laptops and tablets, the average number of connected devices an enterprise needs to support has risen to 4.6 devices per user, up from 4.1 in 2015. With millennials, the number is even higher with 5.8 connected devices per user at the beginning of 2017.1 In the past era, IT had to support only two device types – the desktop or the rugged mobile depending on job type. In this era, the number of devices and device types has increased substantially and can be expected to continue to rise. This proliferation of devices and device types just caused mobile complexity to take another big leap.
3. Velocity of mobile’s OS and app changes far outpaces desktop updates: Users are adding devices at a growth rate of as much as 580%, complicating speed of change. Not only do internal Help Desks have to support devices from previous eras, monthly Operating System and Application updates for mobile continue to stream in. The rapid frequency of these updates, which occur on a third party’s schedule, come with little advance notice. In the desktop environment, Operating System (OS) updates can be expected every two to three years, while mobile’s operating systems usually receive major updates every six to 12 months. In addition, minor OS refreshes take place in between these major updates.
4. Constant flow of OS upgrades distracts IT: Compounding the fast-track pace of updates is the lack of tools to control users’ upgrading efforts. For example, each Android release is managed not through a central authority, but by each mobile operator. This lack of synchronization often forces the enterprise and its users to manage a constant stream of updates by operator and device type over many months. In this era, the complexity of managing app and OS changes, while overseeing device upgrades and the proliferation of custom applications, escalated severely. As a result, the burgeoning demands of mobile and its users’ sky-high expectations have distracted IT staffs from their business critical responsibilities.
5. Demand for 7x24x365 mobile connectivity: Enterprises are being asked to support all of this mobile growth with traditional support options designed for desktop-based devices and applications. Simply put, mobile devices aren’t used like traditional desktops and mobile support doesn’t resemble Help Desk-based troubleshooting for desktops. Additional pressure on the enterprise comes from the need to eliminate, or at least minimize, users’ downtime due to nonfunctioning mobile devices and applications.
The majority of today’s mobile end users say customers (66%) and colleagues (70%) expect them to be available outside of traditional work hours, and mobile is how they maintain contact.2
Mobility is becoming a 7x24x365 asset for most enterprises today, and the underlying support infrastructure has to be there to support always on availability.
6. IT staffing lacks deep mobile knowledge: The impact on IT has been pronounced, especially in light of the fact that IT staffing has not been funded to hire enough expert staff to keep pace with increasingly sophisticated users’ mobility demands. Only 16% of CIOs polled said they were adding positions in 2016. These ame IT staffs are under pressure to support the latest-and-greatest iterations of mobile, while steadily advancing enterprise-wide strategic initiatives such as cloud computing, security and IoT.
7. Cost management concerns: A recent survey by IDG and CIO.com highlighted the concerns executives have over controlling mobile costs. In all, 44% of executives surveyed stated that cost management was the top challenge in meeting enterprise needs. Supporting multiple mobile device types was the top concern related to costs, with worries about time commitments and resource costs following closely. With the enterprises’ acceptance of unlimited data plans, overages on data usage have largely been eliminated. However, the ongoing staff costs associated with having enough mobile resources to support a myriad of device types and user profiles continues to be a very real issue for CIOs.
8. Backlog of user applications growing, while number of deployed apps remains flat: The resulting impact on enterprises’ ability to “get things done” in mobility may be best reflected in mobile applications. While the demand for mobile applications to support business needs is rising, 91% of survey respondents pointed to an average growth of almost 26% in mobile app development spending. However, deployment of these apps is languishing.3 Year-over-year growth in deployed enterprise mobile apps has remained flat from 2016 to 2017 with an average of eight mobile apps being developed and deployed, while the backlog of planned, but not developed, applications has increased by 214%.4
9. Lines of Business taking over mobility: Due to these unmet needs, more Lines of Business (LOB) are taking over responsibility for mobility. In all, 74% of total mobility spending now happens outside of IT departments, up from 69% the prior year.5 Gartner expects that by 2020, 70% of all enterprise mobile apps will be developed or adopted without IT involvement.6
10. A lack of visibility into mobility management and performance: Most enterprises are struggling to maintain visibility across their mobile device deployments to understand which devices are in use, which are performing well, which need replacement, which apps are being used and how a myriad of other data points can be analyzed to determine enterprise mobility’s overall performance. Complicating this need for aggregated performance reporting is a mix of different device types. The complexity of this multiple variables driving mobile performance either makes vendor-specific management platforms too myopic for the enterprise, or requires a myriad of management systems and tools to understand and manage mobility at the enterprise level.
Clearly, a seismic shift in enterprises’ expectations for mobility and the internal resources needed to plan, deploy and support devices, users and applications occurred in this third era.
