About 38% of enterprises still only use mobility solutions for basic tools like email and calendar, and do not have a firm requirement to secure their staff’s devices.
According to a study from Sapio Research, this is having significant negative consequences: These enterprises are 15% less productive and 29% less profitable than those with more advanced mobile capabilities, such as file-sharing apps, collection and analysis of data, app integrations and multifactor authentication.
The study examines the different rates of adoption of enterprise mobility across more than 500 businesses in the UK and the US and classifies them into a four-stage maturity model: Entry-level, opportunistic, additive and transformational. Progress through each stage was determined by the degree of use of productivity tools and data, and the security measures required.
Despite enterprise mobility being an accepted norm, 38% of enterprises have failed to progress beyond the entry level stage, and 81% remain in the bottom half. About a fifth (19%) are in the third stage of the model, additive (typified by app integrations), the collection of devices’ contextual usage data.
There are clear incentives for moving up the stack, as it were: CIOs and IT teams who have delivered the most advanced enterprise mobility are perceived 14% and 12% more favorably within their organizations than those who have only introduced the most basic of functionality.
And, the study showed that the simple step from entry-level to opportunistic (first stage to second stage) delivers the greatest and quickest performance improvements. Just by introducing file-sharing tools, monitoring usage data and requiring at least native OS security measures to be in place on the device, enterprises see a 9% profitability improvement and 7% productivity boost.
“The findings of this study underline the case for companies to dedicate investment to their enterprise mobility strategy,” said Dave Schuette, executive vice president of the Enterprise Business Unit at Synchronoss, which sponsored the survey. “Until now, the benefits of mobility maturity have been anecdotal or theoretical. We now know that those who invest in advanced mobility tools—balancing efficiency with security—benefit from double-figure improvements in productivity, in turn contributing to massive profitability gains.”
Security, he added, is one of the most important aspects of mobile maturity.
“Productivity doesn’t come from the availability of mobility tools alone,” Schuette noted. “Collecting contextual data from employees’ devices lets a company make informed, deliberate changes that improve its operations and processes. That same data can also be used for more robust user ID verification, boosting security. The higher the security on a device, the more capabilities an organization can confidently add to it—which in turn improves productivity. It’s the ultimate virtuous circle for enterprise technology.”