Business Mobility in 2016: Bold Ambition plus Capability Key
By Sanjay Khanna, Senior Analyst, Canadian Mobile Business Applications and Services, IDC Canada
2016 is an inflection year for business mobility in Canada. As we step into the 16th year of the 21st century, Canadian organizations’ ability to select and deploy next-gen advanced tech will largely define successful adaptation to the kinds of challenging economic conditions that typically impact both business and consumer mindsets.
Amid such stressors, and perhaps even because of them, 60% of new applications worldwide will be “mobile first” with no PC antecedent by 2018, according to IDC. Much of this mobile application growth will be driven by organizations capitalizing on digital transformation (DX).
In IDC’s view, DX reinvents a process or a business function—or creates an entirely new business model. Digital transformation enablers include mobility, cloud, social business, and big data analytics plus innovation accelerators, such as cognitive computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). For Canadian organizations to achieve success nationally or globally, they should explore how to embrace digital disruption.
To take steps towards DX maturity, Canadian organizations need to transition from the Digital Resister ad hoc stage to more ambitious stages such as the Digital Explorer opportunistic stage, the Digital Player repeatable stage, the Digital Transformer managed stage—and, ultimately, the Digital Disrupter optimized stage.
This will take time. In November 2015, IDC Canada surveyed Canadian C-suite and line-of-business executives about their DX journey. The survey revealed that 11% of these business leaders state they have “no strategy,” 6% are “planning but have yet to begin,” 23% are “at the start,” 43% are “in the midst,” and 16% are “digitally transformed.”
This is a good proxy for IDC’s enterprise mobility research in Canada, which reveals that 59% of Canadian organizations have NOT yet deployed any mobile applications. In addition:
- 68% have no plan to deploy mobile analytics
- 62% have no plan to deploy enterprise mobile application platforms
- 56% have no plan to deploy mobile application management
- 52% have no play to deploy mobile content management.
Interestingly, this low level of “business mobile maturity” is occurring at a time when IDC research also shows that 63.7% of business and IT professionals state that mobility has “high” or “very high” business value.
How to explain this gap while taking advantage of the enterprise mobility opportunity? Recent IDC interviews with six Canadian mobile-first CIOs indicate that leading organizations sense opportunity and have confidence in their ability to execute. They have internal capability and external relationships to successfully deploy mobile devices, platforms, applications, and services. They strategically and operationally link business mobility to cloud, social business, and big data analytics technologies, as well as innovation accelerators such as IoT.
In addition, these mobile-first CIOs are among the 7% of Canadian organizations that effectively bring enterprise mobility to industry-specific applications AND team collaborative applications, in industries as diverse as manufacturing and healthcare.
In two upcoming posts, as part of this business mobility blog series, I will look at (1.) business mobility and cloud, and (2.) business mobility, cloud, big data analytics and intelligent wide area networks (WAN). For Canadian organizations that seize the opportunity to transform digitally, 2016 could be the year of laying claim to unassailable market and industry leadership.
Sanjay Khanna is Senior Analyst, Canadian Mobile Business Applications and Services at IDC Canada. He follows trends, new products and vendor strategies, and forecasts the market size for mobile applications and services in Canada. He also works with IDC colleagues to deliver research perspectives on how business mobility intersects with industry verticals such as financial services and healthcare, as well as the Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive computing, robotics, and other innovation accelerators. Follow Sanjay on Twitter: @Sanjay1
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