Enterprise mobility is poised to fundamentally change the IT landscape. Here’s an overview of the opportunities and some early lessons on how to manage the associated security risks, costs, and organizational challenges.
Chief information officers are no strangers to change. Mainframes, personal computing, and the Internet have all transformed the world of business technology for both enterprises and technology vendors. Now, CIOs see the next disruption coming fast.
Mobility—rising from its humble beginnings—is on a roll, driven by ever-higher-performing smartphones, tablets, and other devices enabled by 3G and 4G networks, as well as an explosion of innovative applications. Indeed, we believe that enterprise IT is on the brink of a revolution that promises to boost productivity by expanding office functionality beyond the brick-and-mortar location. There are opportunities galore, but cost, governance, and security challenges must also be reckoned with.
A steep adoption trajectory
The mobility landscape is, in many ways, similar to that of the Internet of the late 1990s, which was driven by consumer adoption and constant innovation. Consumers use mobility extensively in their personal lives and are demanding it in their professional lives. When we recently surveyed 250 CIOs on their mobility strategies, 56 percent reported strong demand from employees to support a wide range of mobile devices. Seventy-seven percent of CIOs were planning to allow staff to use personal mobile devices to access company data and applications. Almost all the CIOs said they expected to deploy more than 25 mobility applications in the next two years.
Mobile-device innovations are being introduced at a frenetic pace, with new categories and subcategories (for example, enterprise-focused tablets) emerging every few months. With each innovation comes a new set of uses and opportunities. Thirty percent of the CIOs we surveyed said laptops could be replaced by tablets in the coming years.
Supporting the mobile revolution is a broad set of cloud-based applications that enable mobile devices to overcome many of their inherent limitations and allow users to access their content, regardless of the storage capacity of their devices. Cloud-based enterprise applications enable ubiquitous access to critical enterprise resources, such as customer relationship management (CRM). (…)
Font i fotografia: notícia de www.mackinseyquarterly.com 30/09/2012