The Big Changes Coming in Enterprise Mobility Are Organisational

Reorganisation of IT Departments Must Be a Focus

Enterprises across the globe have spent the last 24 months navigating the business opportunities and risks of greater strategic mobility in the face of tremendous market change. However, the next 24 months could bring the biggest changes in enterprise mobility we’ve seen.

There’s no doubt that important technology trends will be at the heart of this change. The rise of enterprise mobility management solutions will continue, as will the mobilization of enterprise apps and content. The advancement of peripherals, mobile middleware services, identity and access management technology, mobile analytics and outsourcing will all drive the next phase of the market.

However, we believe that the next 24 months will be defined more by reorganisation than technology alone, as firms bring mobility to more areas of their companies. The subject of organisation is already part of CIOs’ conversations about mobile strategy. It’s shaping technology requirements, buying behaviour, maturity levels and best deployment practices. The topics of change management, re-engineering business processes, organisational culture, governance and data privacy are becoming central to discussions about mobile technology. There’s little guidance in the market on these themes.

I was talking this week with a forward-thinking global manufacturer. The conversation illustrated the internal changes that lie ahead for many companies. The firm’s CEO recently approved a major overhaul of its IT department to improve mobile support for users and customers. This was in response to over 1,000 mobile app requests from employees in the past year. It was a major transformation within the business, driven entirely by mobility.

Many IT departments across the globe are currently implementing — or will need to implement — similar overhauls over the next 12 months as they build their strategy and organisational models to support mobility, with a particular focus on mobile applications.

There needs to be a shift from talking about mobile in an enterprise world to talking about the enterprise in a mobile world. This distinction will become increasingly important as companies seek out the best practices for organisational change in the transition to a mobile world.

These organisations and the underlying technology drivers will shape CCS Insight’s enterprise research as the market undergoes its biggest transformation yet.