The Accenture CIO Mobility Survey 2012 Executive Summary: Always On, Always Connected. Keeping Up With Mobility

As with the Internet, CIOs must do three things:

• Understand where in their organization developers are creating mobility applications.
  
  
• Discern how to quickly integrate them into a cohesive strategy.
  
  
• Use that strategy as a foundation for competitive advantage.
  
  

Read the complete survey results.

Development for Accenture Mobility, discusses the findings of the company's global surveys of C-level executives, business unit leaders, IT decision-makers and application developers regarding how enterprises are looking at mobility – its benefits, its obstacles, and their strategies to address them.

What three steps should CIOs take in their mobility strategy?

How can Accenture help companies devise a mobile strategy?

Download the Transcript for the full 10 part series [PDF, 1.23MB] PDF Help

To gauge the perceptions of mobility among IT professionals, Accenture Research surveyed several hundred CIOs and several thousand application developers in North America, Europe, Asia and South America in January 2012. The results were startling. When asked to tally their priorities, 78 percent of CIOs placed mobility in their top five.

But the survey results also revealed some intriguing anomalies. When Accenture asked CIOs about their priorities for the coming year, the answers diverged based on geography. Far more CIOs in emerging markets focus on mobility compared to those in established markets, in part perhaps of their ability to capitalize on greenfield opportunities. That means emerging markets avoid integrating with large back-end legacy systems, and may not even have deployed desktop applications.

And there are other concerns that complicate the rush toward mobility.

Accenture sees three key elements in developing a mobile strategy: technology, business requirements and management.

Technology—This element helps span everything from platform choice to development tools. Are you going to internally standardize on one device, or encourage the BYOD concept? This affects your choice of development tools, which range from native to cross-platform or hybrid approaches. It will also affect your deployment choices, such as whether you will make applications available through external app stores or internal downloads.

Business Requirements—This element encompasses identifying where mobile solutions are most important within your company, so you can prioritize development efforts. Given the strong commitment that CIOs in emerging markets have toward mobile solutions, it may behoove other CIOs to make mobile solutions available to employees in other countries, and verify that they are localized properly.

At the same time, companies may choose to emphasize other key areas highlighted by the survey results: sales, internal collaboration, or applications serving customer service.

Management—Given the degree with which the mobility market shifts, it’s important that CIOs maintain strong strategic oversight to tweak it when necessary as conditions shift.

It won’t be easy to establish your strategy, because such an effort requires identifying future projects and identifying current projects and confirming they are nudged toward your ultimate goals.

• Discovery—Identify current projects as well as future goals; remember that business units may be tackling applications on their own.

• Acceleration—Having identified projects you want to pursue and the underlying technologies, promote acceleration by standardizing your efforts as much as possible. Use common code—aka an “application factory”—for basic elements spanning people, process, and tools. These factories help reduce overlap and increase developer efficiency. Establishing common interface elements for employees may shorten training time and increase productivity.

• Innovation—Once you’ve created a strong foundation for internal success, you can start looking at other capabilities to make your mobile applications more competitively differentiated. How can you target those key areas and create even better tools for helping reduce sales cycles or gathering customer insights at the moment they’re making purchase decisions? Those kinds of insights are closer to reality than ever before, but only if you understand your strategic goals.

Read the complete survey results.