Recent global survey on business mobility conducted by Nokia and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and in cooperation with the CIO Forum, suggests that competition is pushing businesses towards greater mobility, and companies plan to adopt mobile applications for core business activities.
Nokia and EIU polled more than 500 global executives across a range of industries to find out how their organizations were using business mobility. In the survey, 3/4 of the respondents pointed to human factors such as attracting the best talent – including new entrants to the workforce–improving customer support, and building brand reputations as reasons for deploying business mobility.
The survey shows that business mobility has gone mainstream. Well over 1/3 of executives reported that at least 20% of their employees can be considered “mobile workers.” Furthermore, respondents cited competitive benefits of business mobility solutions, such as:
- Important competitive advantages such as quicker response time to customers (36%);
- Improved collaboration within the enterprise (27%);
- And the ability to work with multiple partners/suppliers (12%).
The survey also showed that activities occurring in the field are increasingly core to the success of a business and companies can no longer rely on information merely being captured in the field. Respondents also planned to increase their use of mobility solutions over the next two years, with companies more likely to make greater use of:
- Remote network access (41%);
- Customer relationship management (34%);
- Collaborative applications such as mobile groupware (21%);
- And sales force automation (17%).
Along with advantages, respondents also said business mobility brings challenges such as managing a mobile workforce (19%) and maintaining a cohesive culture across a dispersed workforce (18%). The ability to measure the impact of business mobility on a company’s competitiveness was also cited (12%).