"Ye ha! Saddle up pardners and ride like the wind, we’re heading to mobility." The latest IT gold rush is on and mobility is where it’s at. At least that’s where the Accenture Mobility CIO Survey 2013 says it is.
And the figures are hard to dispute. According to the survey of more than 400 global IT executives:
Seventy-nine per cent viewed mobility as a revenue generator; 84% believed it would significantly improve customer interactions; 83% said it would significantly affect their business; 75% identified mobility as one of their top five priorities and more than a third placed it in the top two; 59% have already implemented a centralised, companywide strategy for mobility. What’s more, 43% were counting on mobility to improve field service/customer service delivery and 33% believed it would accelerate the sales cycle; 36% said they planned to invest in mobility to drive revenues through customer engagement on mobile devices; and 34% planned to invest in mobility to drive revenue through transactions on mobile devices.
And they’re deadly serious about the potential effects mobility could have on their business. According to the survey, 73% believe mobility will have as much, if not more, of an impact on their business as the Web revolution in the late 90s. Think about it. Whether they’re right or not, that’s an amazing statistic. And if you’re someone who can help them adopt a mobility strategy, it must be great to be in an area where your customers believe that what you’re doing for them will have such an impact on their business.
Those figures not only appear pretty enticing in terms of channel partners looking for areas to target when talking to customers but even more so in identifying what they should talk to them about.
The research also threw up a few challenges that CIOs accepted would still be part and parcel of any move to integrate a mobility strategy into their business. Just under a half were concerned about data security, especially on devices not issued by corporate IT departments (which, let’s face it, is pretty much all of the devices driving BYOD), 41% were worried about cost and budget and just under a third identified lack of interoperability with current systems as an issue. Nevertheless, they believed the opportunities far outweighed any concerns.
When companies were asked to identify where they needed to invest in mobility, they named several areas: allocating budget for mobile initiatives such as hardware and application development; retraining staff to handle management of mobile devices and applications and hiring more mobile expertise within their own ranks. The good news is that given the demand for mobile skills, many companies are planning to use "external experts to develop or implement those [mobility] strategies".
If that’s not an invitation to channel partners, I’m not sure what is.
So the next big question, given that we know that customers are definitely interested in mobility and are seriously looking at how to implement mobility strategies, is just how ready and capable are channel partners to help them achieve their goals? Let’s hope the answer is ‘very’ or ‘more than’. Otherwise, there’s going to be a lot of people left by the wayside on the road to mobility.
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