Accenture Mobility CIO Survey 2013: Business Opportunities in the Maturing Mobility Market

Understand the trends driving the rapid maturation of the mobility market and identify the opportunities for your business.

Mobility is now pervasive and it is maturing rapidly in the corporate environment. The Accenture Mobility CIO Survey 2013 explores the trends driving this maturation and identifies investment priorities for companies that are currently lagging.

From Accenture’s survey of more than 400 global IT executives:

• Seventy nine percent of respondents cited mobility as a revenue-generator.

• Eighty four percent said mobility would significantly improve customer interactions.

• More than one-third of respondents cited mobility as one of their top-two priorities, 75 percent put it in in their top five.

• Fifty-nine percent say they have implemented a centralized, companywide strategy for mobility.

• Thirty six percent of respondents cited driving revenues through customer engagement on mobile devices as the reason for investing in mobility.

• Thirty four percent of respondents cited driving revenue through transactions on mobile devices as the reason for investing in mobility.

Take a look at the key results from the survey in our Mobility CIO Survey Infographic

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It is not news that mobility is affecting how business works. We are coming to terms with the fact that employees can now exchange data with corporate servers wherever they are, and interact with customers and prospects, too.

What is really compelling is the speed at which the mobility market is maturing. Accenture undertook a survey of more than 400 global IT executives to understand the trends driving this rapid maturation and to identify ways in which lagging companies can catch up.

• Seventy nine percent of respondents cited mobility as a revenue generator, 84 percent said it would significantly improve customer interactions and 83 percent said it would significantly affect their business.

• One-third of respondents cited mobility as one of their top-two priorities, rising to 53 percent in China and 50 percent in India. Seventy-five percent put it in in their top five.

• Fifty-nine percent say they have implemented a centralized, companywide strategy for mobility, while 58 percent say that their mobile strategy is “moderately” developed.

• Driving revenues through customer engagement (36 percent) and driving revenue through transactions on mobile devices (34 percent) were cited as reasons for investing in mobility. Other reasons included improving field service/customer service delivery (43 percent) and accelerating the sales cycle (33 percent).

As companies make the move to integrate their mobility strategy into their business, they understand that—especially for a new and in some areas, immature, technology—some common challenges remain. These include:

• Data security, especially on devices not issued by corporate IT departments (45 percent).

• Cost and budget concerns (41 percent).

• Lack of interoperability with current systems (31 percent).

The survey also showed that concern about employees using their own devices (the bring-your-own-device phenomenon, or BYOD) is not as prevalent as previously thought. Eighty-five percent of respondents say they support smartphones while 78 percent support tablets.

But opportunities outnumber the challenges. IT executives can already map the link between social networking and collaboration tools through mobility—that is, finding the right person or information quickly either through social communication tools for the enterprise or shared data repositories in the cloud. When asked to rank their top three mobile features, 45 percent of respondents cited knowledge sharing and 40 percent cited collaboration.

More than most new technologies, the ability to drive revenue through mobility is clear for IT executives too. Payment and commerce services are becoming a top priority across industry verticals, cited by 38 percent of respondents.

What about companies that may not be as far along as competitors: how should they invest in mobility? Interestingly, their path need not be that much different from companies already investing in mobility. According to the survey results, key areas of investment include:

• Allocating budget for mobile initiatives, such as hardware and application development.

• Retraining staff to handle management of mobile devices and applications.

• Hiring more mobile expertise within their ranks.

Given the demand for mobile skills, it is also not surprising that many companies plan to leverage external experts to develop or implement those strategies.

At the same time, companies need to identify where within their own organizations or industries they can get the most benefit from mobile deployment. From there, they should conduct gap analysis to identify what they need to do to catch up to peers or competitors and—ideally—get ahead.

While enterprises’ mobile strategies are maturing, there are still many potential opportunities for taking advantage of the technology, especially as the boundaries of what constitutes mobile computing expands. Initiatives include:

• Exploring machine-to-machine communication.

• Ensuring a complete and viable solution from the user experience with the mobile hardware to the backend systems themselves.

• Improving the efficacy of the combination of visual simplicity and underlying complexity.

• Realizing the potential of analytics to improve both business processes and the customer experience.