Enterprise Mobility: Dialling 2016

The way we work has changed forever. The shift towards mobility has been one of the biggest story in enterprise IT over the past few years. We are officially unstrapped from our desks, but the question remains, are we more productive now?

Enterprises are yet to leverage mobility to make employees satisfied and more productive. Businesses are also yet to expand work processes beyond office walls, and harness the power of these newer technologies to build solutions for connecting employees to corporate data, to each other, and to customers on the go.

Scattered employees outside workplaces are in a state of strategic and tactical transition. Today’s enterprises must cope with growing challenges of tougher competition, eroding margins, and finding and retaining good employees. Organizations also face a series of daunting issues, such as improving customer relations, reducing operational costs, maximizing worker productivity and increasing opportunities to grow profit. In response, field operations will be changing at an escalating pace over the next five years.

According to IDC, IT organizations will dedicate at least 25 percent of their software budget to mobile application development and management by next year, 2016. Also the number of enterprise applications optimized for mobility will quadruple by 2016.

That’s something, Maruthi Sankar Chirala, VP-IT, Magma Fincorp, also agrees with. He says that businesses are leveraging enterprise mobility to transform computing from desktops into the hands of employees. “We are domineeringly pushing mobility mainly on the field-force front of workers and developing a garland of applications,” he adds.

Agreeing to Chirala, Nagarjuna Fertilizers & Chemicals also says, “We started with SMS-based, push-pull services, but now we are adopting mobile applications aggressively for our employees. We therefore issued smartphones to our outsourced employees and encourage their applications,” says Jitendra Singh, CIO and head-business excellence.

For most organizations, responding to the new realities of field operations involves substantial new investment, especially in mobile technology. Many studies says, more than 70 percent of field organizations are expecting to increase IT budgets even more by 2020.

Undoubtedly, enterprise mobility is the future of field operations, and therefore this makes it a major driver of significant increases in IT budgeting and investment. Some CIOs, customers and users predicted that their mobility workforces will increase over the coming years.

Accordingly, they expect their IT budgets to increase. CIOs also believe the specific technologies that will offer them the best return of investments over the next five years are wearable technology, big data, analytics and IoT.

Faced with an overwhelming amount of available data between today and 2020 and beyond, IT decision makers indicated that field operations will also be increasing their investments in analytics and big data solutions, with the objective of providing more actionable information. Bottom line, the industry’s growing commitment to mobility will enable more proactive field operations that will enhance both revenues and profitability.