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IBM has released a new report that offers businesses guidance on how to advance enterprise mobility for their employees.
The report is titled “The Individual Enterprise – How Mobility Redefines Business” and was developed by the IBM Institute for Business Value. It illustrates how analytics-driven mobile strategies can redefine business and how work gets done, the company said.
While many organizations recognize the potential impact of mobile, few have the foundation in place to capitalize on the power of mobile and data analytics.
“Currently most enterprise mobile use has been restricted to email, calendaring and instant messaging,” said Saul Berman, vice president and chief strategist in IBM Global Business Services, in a statement. “Consider how combining mobile devices and cognitive analytics can completely transform how we work, industries operate and companies perform. Getting started with this new imperative requires leaders who can define what this journey will look like and champion a call to action.”
The report showed that 84 percent of CIOs rate mobile solutions as a critical investment to get closer to customers and 94 percent of C-suite is considering mobile applications that are customer facing, the greater opportunity exists in the enterprise to impact the way people work, collaborate and innovate.
A successful mobile initiative will enable employees to access relevant information and insights when and where needed, as well as create fundamental new value, weigh outcomes using analytics and data streams, and focus on leading edge features of the latest mobile devices.
According to the research, evolving to a mobile enterprise requires a solid foundation with fundamental components including security, connectivity, resiliency, orchestration, and insights and learning. A successful mobile enterprise should employ centralized device management and security to overcome the fragmented device platforms resulting from existing “bring-your-own-device” (BYOD) programs. The enterprise also should minimize platform complexities introduced with “always-on” mobile networks in conjunction with flexible architectures that can easily incorporate changing components.
In addition, the IBM study said a successful mobile enterprise should adopt interchangeable solutions to create efficiencies and enable both organizations and individuals to quickly combine and recombine different applications and data streams based on actual circumstances. It also must use analytics to grow more responsive and learn on the fly, ultimately enabling predicative and prescriptive recommendations that further inform decision making.
Once the foundation for enterprise mobility has been laid, the report outlines five steps to progress the strategy including the development of “journey maps” that depict user interactions, IBM said. These steps are live experiments that can be improved and expanded upon based on employee experiences.
IBM has more than 5,000 mobile experts and has secured more than 4,300 patents in mobile, social and security technologies that have been incorporated into IBM MobileFirst solutions. Through IBM’s partnership with Apple, the two organizations are transforming enterprise mobility with a new class of industry-specific business apps, IBM said.
IBM also boasts a deep portfolio of big data and analytics consulting and technology expertise based on experiences drawn from more than 40,000 data and analytics client engagements. This analytics portfolio spans research and development, solutions, software and hardware, and includes more than 15,000 analytics consultants, 4,000 analytics patents, 6,000 industry solution business partners, and 400 IBM mathematicians, IBM said.