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Achieving value through your mobility strategy

How can your mobility strategy improve your company's profitability, productivity and performance? Find out here.

The first wave of mobility was all about the devices – choosing which platforms to support and mastering implementation. Now, the game is all about measurable outcomes.

Make no mistake – mobility has moved beyond the early hype and is now well and truly mainstream. Hardly any organisations forbid employees from accessing emails and other corporate systems on their smartphones or tablets, and a large percentage of companies say they’re planning to invest in mobile devices in 2015, according to a recent Tech Research Asia (TRA) report Work 3.0: Your 20:20 Vision.

Interestingly, two in three organisations surveyed admitted they need to introduce business processes and apps to achieve value from these devices. According to TRA’s research, 91 per cent of Australian firms believe mobility is important to their organisation while 33 per cent say it is “very important”.

How to capitalise on new mobility strategies

One of the first things IT professionals can do when it comes to capitalising on a new mobility strategy is to forget about the technology. The device, and whether it’s iOS, Android or Windows 8.1, is irrelevant. It’s all about what the organisation wants to do with it. As the whole world becomes increasingly networked, it’s about what a company’s business partners and customers want to do and how they want to communicate. Put simply, it’s all about targeted, measurable and verifiable business outcomes.

Going digital vital to mobility strategy

Mobility, however, is just one piece of the puzzle. Digitisation and automation are also key to getting the most out of a mobile workforce. With too many organisations still relying on unproductive manual, paper-based processes, there’s still a lot to be done when it comes to digitising business processes. Really, what’s the point of having a mobile sales force operating out of their cars and home offices if they still need to post or drop into the office to submit an expense report? It’s also important that the paper-based process is organised as efficiently as possible beforehand. Speeding up a bad process with digitisation and automation just means that the train wreck will happen faster than before.



Inefficient business processes causing friction

Nevertheless, it’s important to keep in mind that the friction of inefficient business processes is a drain on all companies. Indeed, TRA’s research in 2013 found that 67.7 per cent of Australian organisations lost two hours per employee, per week because of inefficient processes. Two years later, through a combination of greater awareness and increased complexity due to mobility, that proportion has actually increased to 93 per cent. Nevertheless, organisations are still not putting efficiency front and centre, with only 20 per cent rating automation as “very important” to their organisation.

Mobility, digitisation and automation can be thought of as a three-legged stool. If one leg is weak, the whole piece of furniture is unstable. Ensure your business is stable and sustainable for its long-term future by introducing forward-thinking mobility strategies that align with your business objectives.

To discover more insights from Tech Research Asia, download our free infographic.

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