Consumerization Talks – Sharing the Stewardship of Mobile Data
December 27, 2011 Leave a comment
An interview with Philippe Winthrop
Managing Director
The Enterprise Mobility Foundation
According to Gartner, the consumerization of IT is the most significant trend affecting the IT Industry in the next ten years. As the Managing Director of The Enterprise Mobility Foundation, how would you describe the impact that this trend is having on the members of your organization?
Your IT department, like IT functions everywhere, is charged with managing corporate applications, preserving the security of your company’s lifeblood, and complying with government and industry regulations. Meanwhile, a torrent of mobile devices, neither issued nor owned by the organization, is pouring down on you. Don’t feel alone. The BYOD storm has been raging for two years, and you would be surprised how many companies are struggling to put a strategy in place to manage it. For example, an enormous bank—whose name and geography I can’t disclose—is still thinking about PIN functionality and email and calendaring, rather than application development and management. In this mobile conundrum, they and many other companies are only looking to their IT department for direction.
Employees around the globe are increasingly becoming more mobile as wireless devices and mobile data networks become ubiquitous, simple to use and affordable. The business benefits of extending enterprise data and applications to mobile workers are already apparent. These benefits include higher productivity, higher customer satisfaction and higher talent retention, to name just a few. Many recent studies from Gartner, IDC, Forrester and others point out that almost half of the U.S. workforce is already mobile and away from the primary work location for more than 20% of the time. Typologies of mobile workers may include road warriors, field workers, day extenders – checking email from home before going to the office, business travelers, tele-workers and so on. In fact, it is probably fair to say that every worker is already an occasional mobile worker as the traditional boundaries of the office have blurred into homes, hotels, conference centers, airports, busses, trains, airplanes and many other commercial venues such as coffee shops and malls.
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