Organisations that fail to set clear mobility strategies are in grave danger of losing out to the competition, and a complete failure to embrace this new reality will have potentially catastrophic consequences.
That was the conclusion drawn yesterday at the IDC Enterprise Mobility Forum 2014 in Johannesburg. The event heard that while the so-called 3rd Platform technologies of mobility, big data, cloud, and social are each gaining prominence in South Africa, mobility stands out as the most disruptive, with its impact being felt across all business functions and at all levels of the economy
“The convergence of IT and telecommunications that is enabled by mobility is empowering businesses to virtualize their processes, and thereby increase productivity, stimulate employee performance, streamline business functions, and improve customer service,” says George Kalebaila, senior research manager for telecommunications and digital media at IDC Africa “It is clear that an era of pervasive mobility is imminent, and those enterprises that have adopted a ‘mobile-first’ mind-set are already pulling ahead of the pack.
“They have encountered and solved various security and accessibility issues, they have mapped their processes and modified them as mobility has changed the nature of their work, and they have redone their back-ends to account for multiple access points.
“They have also connected mobility to emerging elements of the IT mix — cloud computing, data analytics, and social business. And while they are all game changers individually, together they can transform a business, making it more efficient, dynamic, and productive.”
A series of speakers at the IDC Enterprise Mobility Forum 2014 stressed the fact that enterprise IT managers have a tight line to walk with their mobility strategies, not only protecting company data, but increasingly also supporting a wide range of devices that users bring into the organisation.
They also explained that organisations should not fall into the trap of believing that an effective mobility strategy is one that simply mitigates risk and minimises support costs, arguing that every company must determine what benefits mobility can bring to the organization and act accordingly.
The event also examined the potential pitfalls and costs of embracing mobility, although the main focus was on the collaborative, efficient, and integrated organizations that mobility can help create.
To this end, various themes were discussed by the assembled experts, including mobile security, the consumerisation of IT, the development of mobile applications and application platforms, and the implications of the increasingly popular bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend.