China’s Mobility Mandate: An Accenture Research Report 2012

The importance of enterprise mobility in China is growing, as are the opportunities that mobile technologies present for driving innovation and business growth.  CIOs in Chinese organizations have high expectations about the potential impact of mobility, and a significant number of these organizations have a clear mobility strategy in place.  But are they really capturing the more impactful business values of mobile technologies and platforms?

In order to unlock the business opportunities of mobility solutions, the Accenture study reveals that Chinese enterprises will need to embrace three important principles:

• Translate mobility to business value by focusing on targeted business outcomes.
  
  
• Establish a clear mobility framework that can adapt to changing market dynamics.
  
  
• Innovate across internal and external ecosystems to capture market advantage.
  
  

To measure the state of enterprise mobility in China, Accenture Research surveyed 238 CIOs at global enterprises, including 24 from Chinese organizations in January 2012.  The results underscore the growing importance of enterprise mobility to CIOs in China and the opportunities that lie ahead for using mobile technologies to drive innovation and business growth.  CIOs in emerging markets seem more in tune with the opportunity to extract significant business value out of mobility technologies.  And in China, the study revealed particularly pronounced statistics: More than eight in ten CIOs surveyed believe mobility will have a significant impact on the business overall.  Ninety-six percent of the CIOs in China surveyed believe mobility will significantly improve customer interactions, and 91% say mobile technologies will help to improve employee engagement. 

Accordingly, as Chinese companies’ deployment of mobile technologies increases, so does the mobility’s share of IT budgets.  Three-quarters of the surveyed CIOs in China stated a plan to spend more than 30% of their discretionary IT budget on mobility in 2012.  By comparison, among surveyed CIOs in U.S. companies, two-thirds plan to spend less than 20% of their discretionary budget on mobility projects this year.

But CIOs in China are discovering that mobility is no longer a niche capability that can be managed as a project.  The challenge for these CIOs will be to align mobility with the overall business strategy, in order to help their enterprises harvest tangible value from mobile investments.

Accenture sees three ways for CIOs in China to transform their mobility models into strategic advantage for the business.

Translate Mobility to Business Value–CIOs looking to navigate the still-choppy waters of mobility will be well served by tying mobility expenditures to specific outcomes.   For example, what is the impact of replacing print catalogues with tablet-based sakes kits?  Providing sales representatives with a device which showcases rich media and delivers the most up-to-date headquarters inventory can also have a direct impact on top-line revenues.  

Increase Your Agility to Innovate Faster–Mobility initiatives require an enterprise to be agile enough to respond to market shifts and flexible enough to meet changes in customer outcomes.  For organizations such as those in China, where the study shows a high percentage with centralized mobile strategies, the challenge will be to create new business models that tap into evolving mobile ecosystems.  For CIOs, remaining agile will require the decoupling of applications from infrastructure and leveraging third-party services wherever possible to improve time to market.

Play Leapfrog by Leveraging Existing Ecosystems–Competition in China is coming from many non-traditional players that are capitalizing on consumerization-led innovation driving changes throughout the enterprise space.  Established enterprises will need to leapfrog these upstarts, by finding ways to harness existing ecosystems and incorporating them into business value propositions, while exploiting opportunities to expand globally – something their smaller, newer competitors are not yet prepared to do.

In order to translate the mobility mandate into business reality, CIOs in China must undertake these steps:

• Strategic Alignment – Set high-value mobility priorities and align those with the business strategy.  Establishing the proper focus on value and business outcome is a prerequisite to all mobility initiatives.

• Execution – Determine the right path and pace to ensure excellence in project execution.  Defining pilot programs in a specific business unit or geography will provide important insights and generate momentum toward the broader mobility strategy.

• Rapid Evolution – Be prepared to rapidly evolve solutions and priorities within the mobile architecture to support both the business strategy and the rapidly changing Chinese mobility ecosystem.  It’s important to plan for the unexpected – from shifts in regulatory policy to unforeseen competitors and emerging technologies – and to be able to respond quickly.

Read the complete survey results.