BOSTON, MA — (Marketwired) — 10/22/14 — Enterprise mobile collaboration leader today released “,” a comprehensive report based on a recent survey of 1,400+ Business and IT leaders.
“This report clearly defines that many of the greatest challenges enterprises are facing in 2014 are derived from a lack of understanding of the competitive importance of mobile and collaboration platforms, and how strategic these technologies are to their future success,” noted Kevin Benedict, Senior Analyst for Digital Transformation and Mobility at Cognizant. “Both IT and Business must become experts in the use of enterprise mobility solutions and collaboration platforms to strategically transform their companies.”
The report examines the current state of mobile enterprise collaboration, which is immature and disproportionately focused on personal productivity and task efficiency. The report also details where businesses need to focus next to turn mobile enterprise collaboration into a true competitive advantage by helping mobile workers access critical business information distributed across multiple cloud services and enterprise applications.
Sample of top findings:
Today–s enterprises primarily enable employees to conduct basic personal productivity tasks, with personal productivity tools being consistently ranked as the highest available by both Business and IT. In fact, upwards of 90 percent of IT respondents empower employees with email access, 88 percent provide company calendar access and 82 percent enable employees to manage contact directories on their mobile devices. However, there is a consistent gap between what IT claims it is providing and what Business reports available across all collaboration categories (personal, internal and external), with the gap widening to 20-30 percent for internal and external features. Beyond personal productivity, only about a third of today–s business professionals say internal (33 percent) and external (31 percent) collaboration tools are available for them on mobile devices.
Currently, IT reports much higher availability of tools and business applications on mobile across all categories than its Business counterparts. While less than half of Business respondents (47 percent) are aware of the existence of a mobile device policy in their company, 83 percent of IT respondents claim to have one in place. In addition, IT–s investment in business applications on mobile devices does not meet the stated needs and priorities of Business counterparts. For example, 40 percent of IT ranks Customer Service as the business process that will benefit most from mobile enablement compared to only 24 percent of Business respondents.
When asked to describe their own IT organizations in terms of collaboration maturity, 21 percent of IT respondents describe themselves as “Innovators” versus a mere seven percent on the Business side. Conversely, only nine percent of IT respondents rate their IT organizations as “Laggards” compared to 29 percent of Business respondents.
While SharePoint/Office 365 secured the top spot among enterprise collaboration platforms with 44 percent of all respondents reporting having access, this beachhead position does not extend to other Microsoft collaboration tools such as Lync and Yammer (#4 and #8 respectively). As Microsoft does not currently offer a complete collaboration platform and secure enterprise collaboration tools are not readily available in the organization, companies are still willing to adopt non-secure tools to get the job done. Skype and Google Drive are the top two consumer technologies available across all company sizes (44 percent and 42 percent respectively).
According to half of IT respondents, 2015 will be the “Year of Mobile Enterprise Productivity.” Microsoft still leads the pack as being the most likely mobile enterprise innovator in 2015 (cited by 50 percent of IT respondents) followed by Google and Apple (35 and 25 percent respectively). Upwards of 90 percent of IT respondents reported that spending on collaborative technologies for 2015 will either match or exceed 2014.
“For this forecast to become a reality, enterprises need to move well beyond the current focus on personal productivity. In today–s competitive market, giving workers the ability to exchange emails, share files or send instant messages simply isn–t enough,” noted , CEO of harmon.ie. “Some enterprises are already headed in the right direction and understand the need for multi-modal, real-time collaboration to streamline projects and complete critical business processes. We expect 2015 to be a game-changing year in mobile enterprise collaboration as the focus shifts away from individual employees and onto the connected enterprise.”
To access the complete survey findings, download the full report .
harmon.ie commissioned Scratch Marketing + Media to conduct this online survey starting in July 2014 through a variety of online channels. More than 1,400 Information Technology (IT) and Line-of-Business (Business) professionals responded to the first “State of Mobile Enterprise Collaboration” survey. Respondents came from a broad cross-section of industries and company sizes, representing both U.S.-only as well as multi-national businesses, all of which use enterprise collaboration tools on both desktops and mobile devices. Further, the respondent pool collectively covers a wide range of roles within their organizations: C-level executives; leaders who initiate and manage mobile enterprise collaboration projects, initiatives and technology; as well as Business and IT professionals who consume or support mobile enterprise collaboration services in their daily activities. A comprehensive breakdown of respondents by industry, company size, title, etc. can be found in the full report.
empowers the social collaboration workforce by delivering the single-screen experience today–s mobile enterprises and tech-saturated users demand. Giving companies a way to securely support their employees– changing work dynamic, harmon.ie now delivers a seamless user experience anytime, anywhere and on any device. An established global company, harmon.ie combines the power of the top social and collaboration platforms — including IBM, Microsoft and Yammer — to help its thousands of customers around the globe achieve the promise of the mobile enterprise.
Dan MacLeod
Scratch Marketing + Media for harmon.ie
240-603-2887
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