While IT waits out the financial storm, employees push mobility forward

It's no shocker that 2009 has been a tough year on IT leaders. They have been asked to do more with less as the economy has placed unprecedented constraints on budgets: Yankee Group's 2009 Transforming Infrastructure & Transforming Applications Survey of business and IT decision-makers shows that 62 percent of enterprise IT organizations have had moderate reductions in technology spending, and 21 percent have experienced severe pullbacks. More importantly, only 4 percent of firms say they have increased technology spending, meaning innovative initiatives have been placed on the backburner. Mobile and wireless projects have felt this impact: 59 percent of companies have experienced either moderate or severe reductions in mobile application investments.

However, employees are also feeling the pressure amid layoffs and spending cuts, and are being asked to do more to drive their organizations forward. With the workforce becoming increasingly mobile (more than 40 percent of total enterprise employees and growing), this implies that workers require more sophisticated mobility tools to get the job done. And where IT lags, employees are moving forward with mobility on their own.

Employees taking mobility matters into their own hands

While the use of mobile phones among mobile professionals is widespread, the use of smartphones for business purposes is still in its earliest stages. There are approximately 79 million mobile business users in the U.S. today--meaning people currently using a mobile device for business purposes. And although it might appear that every business person we encounter at an airport lounge, business conference or Starbucks is feverishly plugging away at a smartphone, the market remains lightly penetrated at only 20 percent of total mobile devices in the U.S. projected by the end of 2009. In most cases, smartphones are not being supplied by businesses directly to their employees.

Although smartphone growth has shown remarkable resilience during the recession, this has largely been due to growth from the consumer market. The key for business leaders to understand is that many of these devices are being brought into the enterprise via the back-door. According to Yankee Group's 2009 Empowered Employee survey of mobile professionals, among employees who use a smartphone for business purposes, only 13 percent indicate that their device was supplied by their employer, while 16 percent report that they personally purchased their own device. Contrast this with "traditional" business productivity tools such as desktop and laptop computers that enterprises overwhelmingly supply directly to their employees.

It's obvious that an increasingly mobile workforce will purchase mobile technologies such as smartphones and even netbooks where IT lags behind. If business decision makers do not actively adopt emerging mobile technologies and supply them directly to employees, they will consciously or inadvertently wind up with fleets of mobile devices that find their way into the enterprise via alternate channels.

A meeting of IT and employee minds

The good news is that decision-makers appear to also see the value of smartphones: Almost 80 percent believe that smartphones have a high impact on their ability to increase business productivity. In fact, decision makers believe that smartphones can have a much greater impact on their business than other emerging IT initiatives such as cloud computing and SaaS.

The message is clear: End-users and business leaders both agree that mobile technologies such as smartphones can enhance productivity. The challenge for IT leaders is to address the blended lifestyle and consumer technology requirements of mobility while also protecting the needs of the enterprise from a security and manageability standpoint.

Planning ahead for 2010 and beyond

Although IT spending pressures have caused businesses to hold back on pushing forward large-scale mobility initiatives, enterprises can leverage the trend of corporate sponsored and personally acquired smartphone penetration to grow a powerful new computing platform for themselves and potentially defer costs. Amid current spending restrictions, allowing end-users who have bought their own smartphones to use them at work enables the employee base of users equipped with advanced devices to grow without enterprises directly paying for them. In fact, because many users are buying these devices with data plans for personal use, they are also very willing to use them to gain access to applications such as corporate e-mail. Mobility has the opportunity to grow and flourish within enterprises without heavy lifting by procurement or IT.

Of course, this exposes organizations to a higher degree of management complexity and risk. By ceding control of purchase decisions to end-users, enterprise decision-makers are left with a heterogeneous environment of mobile devices that makes security, management and deployment of applications more complex. They also leave themselves open to potentially higher costs if strict policies around expensing mobile service aren't put in place or enforced rigorously. Ultimately, when corporate initiatives for mobile applications get the green light, the devices already being used by employees may not be the ones most appropriate for the enterprise's particular applications, or the most secure and manageable ones.

While there's little doubt that 2009 was a difficult year for IT leaders, they can no longer ignore the need to take a strategic approach to mobility within their organizations. The current economic impact creates even more incentive for business and IT leaders to drive improvements in employee productivity. They must acknowledge the disconnect between leadership technology priorities and what end users are seeking. Wireless tools such as smartphones and consumer applications such as IM and social networking are the technologies that end-users are seeking out to enhance their productivity, while IT is seeking to reduce spending in these areas. As companies plan their IT budgets for 2010, it is imperative that they place a priority on wireless technology investments. Otherwise end-users will continue to take matters (in this case, smartphones) into their own hands, placing IT organizations further behind in the race to control and manage their mobility initiatives.

Eugene Signorini is a vice president of Yankee Group's Anywhere Enterprise research group with an expertise in applications and mobile solutions.

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