The Future of Enterprise Mobility

Abstract Background This study defines enterprise mobility as “The set of technology, applications, processes and policies that support the possibility to perform business activities anywhere at any time”. Enterprise Mobility is one of the main trends in the enterprise ICT environment and a leading vendor describes it as we are entering a new wave of Enterprise Computing called consumer-driven Mobile Computing. Problem Description In order to be a full business system partner to their clients, today and in the future, iStone needs to understand the trends, the key drivers, the key players and the potential development of Enterprise Mobility the coming years and how this will impact its organization and business model. Purpose The purpose of this study is to analyze the current trends and drivers of the phenomenon called Enterprise Mobility; to analyze how the case company - iStone and other key players are positioned with respect to this phenomenon; to create future scenarios of the potential development of this phenomenon and to formulate a recommendation on how the case company should react to the development. Delimitations The study is done from a perspective of enterprises with physical flows of goods, of medium to large size (+100 Mio SEK in turnover). The time frame of the future study is set to three years ahead. Theory & Method The current state analysis uses a multi-source survey approach based on a custom framework that is a development of the PESTLED, Porter’s Five Forces and the Business Model Canvas. The future study is based on Scenario Analysis where the scenarios are constructed by mini-Delphi methodology. The entire study is normative. Result & Conclusion Office workers will seamlessly be able to transition between devices and over networks where the device choice will depend on the screen size, the input 4 capabilities and other inherent characteristics. The “as-a-service” delivery model will be the most important one within three years, at least for new installations. There is a convergence of mobility, cloud computing, social and information that creates new solutions that are combining behavior, sentiment, history and location in real time. The IT-departments are moving towards a more strategic role in charge of policies and interfaces. Security issues are the largest constraint but will not halt the mobility trend. Identification solutions, risk classed data, remote monitoring and other security solutions will increasingly be used. There is a high probability of new disruptive market players and there is a convergence of the offers among the existing strategic vendors. The future development will depend on the dynamics between the Mobility Focus and the Security Focus factors. Based on these factors the study has developed three Future Scenarios and four Enterprise Response Profiles. The scenarios help to understand the development in the market place and recognize the future and the response profiles help to understand the adoption of enterprise mobility in specific enterprises. iStone should start a centralized mobility initiative. The group should share and transfer knowledge across business units, build mobility capabilities, monitor key market trends, evaluate existing and new vendors from a mobility standpoint and create uniform communication material that communicate iStone’s full mobility offer.