Recent research from Yankee Group shows that enterprises are moving away opportunistic mobility and embracing strategic mobility, with the ultimate goal of achieving holistic mobility across their businesses. In 3-10 years, enterprises will exchange point solutions that address specific classes of employees for a common mobility architecture and integrated voice and data services. When companies integrate mobility into their I.T. and business processes, achieve ubiquitous connectivity and find that mobility work behavior, they will have achieved the holy grail—holistic mobility, which is about 10 years down the line for most enterprises.

According to a Yankee Group survey of I.T. professionals regarding strategic business applications, 45% of respondents said that proving wireless access to email is important, second only to replacing legacy applications with service-oriented apps. Staying connected to corporate communications helps field workers keep abreast of news that could potentially impact their field activities.

Respondents’ top three reasons for implementing mobile technologies are:

• enabling access to information (43%),
• improving management of existing mobile apps (39%), and
• improving customer service (37%).

With customers increasingly demanding better service and more information from their vendors, it’s becoming more and more important to equip field forces with the means to view inventory and access other critical enterprise applications. Field force employees constitute the second largest group of mobile workers (29%). Survey respondents asked about the business strategies that are most important to them ranked the following as most significant:

• improving efficiency by transforming business processes (43%)
• empowering employees via improved applications (40%); and
• enabling mobility to enhance workforce productivity (31%).

However, organizations with I.T. budgets of $250,000 and $2M placed more emphasis on improved customer service (tied for second place in terms of priorities).

As I.T. managers look to the future, field service-friendly mobile applications such as remote device management (36%), location capabilities (35%), push-to-talk services (32%) and dispatch and paging (29%) are at the top of their lists. Field service organizations should take note of these trends and reexamine their own mobility initiatives and priorities.

SOURCE: Mobile Enterprise Magazine