Investing in mobility for profit and productivity

Organisations can derive tangible benefits from a mature approach to enterprise mobility, argues Richard Anstey

Our work and personal lives are becoming increasingly digitised. Workforces are becoming more dispersed, with an abundant choice of devices, file-sharing and remote collaboration apps allowing an increasing number of employees to work from wherever they choose, at a time most convenient to them.

Every business therefore requires a meaningful, up-to-date enterprise mobility strategy that covers these issues. When implementing such a strategy, however, CIOs must deal with the challenge of achieving a practical balance between staff productivity, profitability and security.

Employees will want to be able to access important apps and data anytime, from anywhere, across a range of devices, in order to work more flexibly and improve their productivity. At the same time, though, organisations will need to protect themselves and their networks against the rising number of security threats targeting mobile devices and the sensitive data they hold or are have access to.

Having addressed this dilemma, organisations will then be faced with the fundamental business issue of whether a mobility strategy is worth the investment. That is to say, if the strategy can be shown to improve productivity without compromising security, does it represent a commercial benefit. And, if it does, would greater investment mean greater benefit?

To answer these questions, Synchronoss recently commissioned a survey of enterprises in the UK and US to determine whether a more mature mobility strategy equated to greater productivity and profitability.

Lack of maturity

Encouragingly, the survey found that the majority of UK businesses (91 per cent) saw mobility as a positive way to improve productivity levels.

Despite this broad recognition, however, the results showed a surprising lack of progress when it came to advanced mobility. Two in five UK enterprises (39 per cent), for example, don't provide their employees with mobility solutions for basic tools such as remote email (25 per cent), or calendar access (32 per cent), and more than half (54 per cent) have limited visibility over the use of devices and apps within their organisation.

These enterprises are classified within the report as occupying the first stage of maturity with regard to their mobility strategy. Globally, 38 per cent of firms occupy this level, and tend to have no requirement in place to secure their employees' devices, despite a range of mobile security threats such as malware hidden in email and apps on a device, or the loss or theft of the device itself.

The report found these businesses to be 15 per cent less productive, and 29 per cent less profitable than those that offer more advanced mobile capabilities, such as file-sharing apps, data collection and analysis, and multi-factor authentication.

Increasing productivity and profitability

The next level of maturity in the study comprises the 43 per cent of organisations who have implemented dedicated file-sharing tools, the compulsory use of PINs and passwords on devices, and the - albeit limited - collection and analysis of device usage data.

The final 19 per cent of organisations, were considered to have the most mature mobility strategies, due to their integration of apps, and their creative use of mobile contextual data, such as location and app usage, to actively improve their business processes. These businesses also required the use of multi-factor authentication and secure data transmission to protect their devices and the data they hold.

Interestingly, while organisations that had reached this most mature stage were, on average, 15 per cent more productive and 29 per cent more profitable than those at the first level, the simple step from the first to the second level delivered the quickest and most significant improvements in performance. The introduction of file-sharing tools, for example, along with the monitoring of usage data and a minimum requirement for native OS security measures to be in place on a device, meant that, on average, enterprises would see a 9 per cent improvement in profitability and a 7 per cent boost in productivity.

The importance of data

It's worth considering that an increase in productivity won't come about simply by providing mobility tools. Collecting data from employees' devices, for example, will enable a company to make informed, deliberate changes that can improve its processes and operations.

What's more, this same data can also be used to boost security by strengthening a company's user ID verification processes, with contextual deviations in device interactions triggering the need for additional verification if necessary. And, with such heightened security in place, an organisation can then be confident in adding further capabilities or data sources to a device in order to improve productivity.

Until recently, the benefits of investing in enterprise mobility solutions have been largely anecdotal or theoretical. The results of this study, however, demonstrate the extent to which those organisations that commit to a more mature approach and invest in advanced mobility tools, will benefit from significant improvements in productivity. In turn, this will contribute to significant profitability gains.

Richard Anstey is enterprise CTO at Synchronoss