Numbers are not your friend. What one set of numbers conveys is sure to be contradicted by another. Or, as any qualitative analyst will tell you, it’s all in the interpretation.
Fast Company did a story recently about how business people should learn to think like a spy. Yet as the spy in the story recounted, raw data isn’t always accurate data and a chemical weapons factory can, indeed, turn out to be a salt manufacturing facility. It’s all in how the numbers get parsed.
We did a survey at the end of 2012 that asked 1000 executives about various aspects of enterprise mobility, and 64% said that, even though half were being pressured by employees to provide mobile access to enterprise applications, data, tasks, and workflows, their reason for delaying was a concern about security. This was in spite of the belief – among 98% of the respondents – that enterprise mobility would increase productivity.
A separate survey conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Progress Software came up with similar numbers, but revealed another obstacle to enterprise-to-mobile implementation – 56% felt they lacked the necessary skills to create apps and enable them to run on the full range of BYOD smartphones and tablets. As a result, 62% gravitated toward having the work done by an external third party.
This is frustrating – for the companies’ employees, surely, but also for us. That’s simply because we know how easy, fast, and affordable it can be to configure and deploy mobile enterprise access. Rather than a whole new set of skills, an average employee (with about an hour’s worth of training) can configure mobile access to databases and reports – access that lets employees take immediate action related to the information they receive on their mobile devices.
For example, a lookup to determine why store #32 isn’t selling the HDTVs that have been a reliably high volume item might reveal that they have none in stock. Webalo could enable the manager who’s reviewing the data on his Android, Apple, BlackBerry, or Windows smartphone (or tablet) to switch to his or her enterprise order entry application, replenish the inventory, get the delivery date, and send a message to the store’s salespeople (through the enterprise sales management system) advising them to offer a 5% discount to any customers who are willing to wait the extra two days until the new stock arrives — just as the manager would do sitting in front of a desktop or laptop.
If that’s not particularly impressive (because you think that any mobile app development tool could build those capabilities into an app), consider that those capabilities – combined from multiple enterprise applications – could probably be configured and deployed to any type of mobile device in less than an hour.
Whether its analytics data and KPIs or access to databases or the ability to perform enterprise tasks and workflows (including taking action on the spot), that 56% who thinks they need special skills would need to re-think their perspective, 62% would save money by not outsourcing their enterprise mobility work, and the 98% who think their productivity would increase would be proved right.
And that’s no lie.
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