The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA) is getting set to unveil the results of a survey looking at enterprise mobility needs and the challenges network managers face when delivering mobile solutions.
Network World Canada staff writer Vanesso Ho recently sat down with Norm Kirkpatrick, CATA’s executive director and Kevin Wennekes, CATA’s vice-president of research, to get a preview of the survey’s findings.
NW: What is the Canadian Networker Trend survey that CATA conducted? What sort of results should we expect?
Wennekes: The survey is examining the business case for mobility connectivity and the challenges of delivering mobile solutions across the business.
We are asking 12 closed-ended questions that will identify some of the concerns around those issues and we will have one open-ended question at the very end where we asked people whether they thought mobility will be a positive or negative impact on their enterprise.
We are hoping we are going to identify some of the attitudes people have towards mobile technology, the perceptions perhaps of what some of the weaknesses are and strengths of enterprise mobility. With the open-ended question, we hope to maybe identify issues that might be outside the box and open up new avenues of discussion that not have been previously covered.
We are getting the views of not only the people managing the mobility technology but the employees who ultimately are impacted by those decisions and how they view working with enterprise mobility. The whole point is to try to open this up to everybody and get a diverse range of views.
NW: Why is enterprise mobility such an important issue?
Kirkpatrick: We live in a world today of higher complexity in how any organization conducts its business. Often senior executives don’t even maintain permanent offices in their own enterprise.
Executives are out so much working with clients that when you go into the office, you book yourself an office for the hours you need or for that day. We’ve got a work force today that is so distributed and yet the key to them doing their work is quick and efficient communication between workers, management and customers.
NW: What do you hope people will take away from the survey?
Kirkpatrick: We want them to take away one or two ideas [and get a] better understanding of how executives are viewing the mobile enterprise. We are starting to see executives even carrying mobility as part of their title. It is a sure sign that there is a lot happening in this space.
