Business is now more global, immediate and mobile than ever before. Technology enables employees to always be in touch with the office, the customer, and the business opportunity - tablet PCs and smartphones provide instant access to information on the go to enhance connectivity, and mobile applications quickly deliver data to improve decision making and increase productivity. Mobile connections are improving and extending stakeholder communications and expanding the enterprise’s reach.
Adoption of mobile devices and technology is booming. For 2013, IDC predicts worldwide IT spending will exceed $2.1 trillion, up 5.7% from 2012. The biggest category driving this growth will once again be smart mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, eReaders), which will grow by almost 20% in 2013 and generate nearly 57% of the industry's overall growth. And the anywhere, anytime access offered by these devices is also changing consumer behavior as more and more people turn to their smartphones and tablets as their primary means of going online. This trend will be further accelerated by the popular embrace of "mini tablets" (sub-8" tablets) in 2013. IDC predicts this segment will account for as much as 60% of the 170 million tablets shipped in 2013 .
Today, ‘mobility’ is about much more than communication on the go. It’s about using technology to enable the extended enterprise to connect and collaborate, linking customers, partners and employees to valuable online information services, from any device, virtually any place and at any time. And importantly, it’s about opening the enterprise to added-value, and innovative services that can enhance its ability to reach its customers – whether through presence or location-based technologies, or more.
As successive waves of digital natives bring the ingrained behavior of constant digital communication into the enterprise environment, business structures, service delivery models and security policies are, by necessity, having to evolve to keep pace. One of the most notable challenges for today’s CIO is the “bring your own device” (BYOD) phenomenon.
Digital natives are used to being able to choose which device they use to access information, communicate or collaborate when, and where they choose, in whatever format they desire. They are used to assessing which applications will meet their needs, and can download and enable them on their own. They see minimal – if any - distinction between personal and corporate information access, which fits neatly with the 24/7/365 global working environment, but doesn’t fit the historic parameters and restrictions of the corporate laptop and smartphone. They see video chat as normal, and expect high-definition interaction as a matter of course. They expect the same flexibility and user-friendly IT experience in the workplace that they have at home, and don’t see why they should check their own devices at the office door, or do what some old-fashioned IT Director tells them.
The end result is a steady increase in the number of consumer mobile devices being used in the business environment, and an increased requirement for a device of choice, rather than a corporate prescription. The corporate locked down smartphone is simply not good enough for Generation Y. And it’s not just about the device, but also the applications they are capable of running. Making business applications mobile, multi-platform and intelligent is the new holy grail for the CIO – as is building out the network with the bandwidth, power to support them.
Consumer-driven IT approaches are increasingly filtering into the workplace, with the Enterprise App store delivering cloud-based applications to the device from the corporate IT environment. Device management and content delivery systems are the key to success, enabling CIOs to transform the office intranet into trusted social workspaces which extend beyond the office walls to give stakeholder ecosystems the freedom to innovate and collaborate, enabling the benefit of fresh thinking to be quickly realized.
