The problem with enterprise mobility strategies isn’t that too few have one; it’s that so many are doing a bad job at it. That’s according to an Accenture Mobility survey of nearly 1500 C-level executives.
The researchers found that around only forty per cent of companies feel they’ve made solid progress in their mobility efforts. As reported in Computerworld, Terri Rinella, managing director at Accenture Mobility, says that a number of challenges are keeping companies from making good on their mobility plans.
For one thing, failure to ensure that a mobile strategy is fully adopted across the entire organization can hamper the development of standards in areas such as mobile app development.
Other problems: CIOs and other line-of-business executive can disagree over who owns the mobile strategy – a phenomenon that is sure to increase as other lines of business take on more responsibility for an enterprise’s IT decisions. And top leadership might not give a mobile strategy the support it needs. Or the strategy itself might be held back by overlaps in mobile funding or overlaps in app usage – where different employees use different apps to perform the same function.
“A mobile strategy also might not be the right strategy or not comprehensive enough,” Rinella says. On the other hand “organizations might have a strategy but not the skills to execute it.”
But at least the awareness piece of the puzzle is in place; 87 per cent of those surveyed said they had a formal mobility strategy, which is a lot better than the 58 per cent of last year’s survey. Thirty-five per cent said that the CEO actively plays a role in developing the mobile strategy.
However 86 per cent of respondents still have to reach the point where their mobility plans pay for themselves, with only ten per cent having actually seen a return on their investment in the last two years. One reason may be problems with the actual rollout of mobile capabilities, reported by around two thirds of the companies polled.
“You have organizations who are the leaders, and then you have this group in the middle,” Rinella said. “Right now, we’re at the group in the middle to the bottom who are struggling to really get things right.”