By Zahid Jiwa, vice president of UK and Ireland sales for OutSystems
Business is now more global, more immediate and more mobile than ever before. Mobile technology enables employees to always be in touch with the office, the customer and the business opportunity. If I’m on a train, at a client site, working from home, or travelling between meetings, I can be as productive as if I was at my desk.
But today, mobility is about much more than just communication on the go. It’s about technology that enables the extended enterprise to connect and collaborate, linking customers, partners and employees to valuable online information services, from any device, virtually any place and at any time. It’s about opening the enterprise to value-added and innovative services that enhance its ability to reach customers.
Driven by user demand
Cisco recently published statistics that demonstrate how user demand is driving every enterprise down the mobile route whether they like it or not. In 2018, there will be 4.9 billion mobile users, up from 4.1 billion in 2013. Mobile traffic grew by 81% in 2013 and mobile video traffic exceeded 50% for the first time in 2012. Moving forward, 66% of all mobile traffic is expected to be video by 2015. And according to IDC, total smartphone shipments are expected to approach 1.7 billion units by 2017, resulting in compound annual growth of 18.4% from 2013 to 2017.
While the stats are compelling, I’m not sure that the CIO is quite so enthralled. Mobility is fundamentally changing the interface of technology and is having a profound impact on enterprise IT and everything it does. The ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) phenomenon in particular is causing IT considerable headaches.
Bombarded CIOs dodge BYOD
Right now, CIOs are being bombarded because everyone within the company wants to use the device in their pocket to access company data and processes. No one wants to lug a company laptop around anymore when they can simply bring their personal tablet into a meeting.
Employees don’t see any distinction between personal and corporate information access either. They expect the same flexibility and user friendly IT experience in the workplace that they have at home and don’t see why they should do what some old fashioned IT director tells them.
As a result, CIOs must now consider how they are going to change the IT environment to accommodate how users wish to interact. They need to consider how they will create new mobile layers for existing applications and how they will build new applications ensuring that mobile is first and at the forefront of their strategy.
Will the enterprise disengage with IT?
Equally, they must also consider what will happen if they don’t. Quite frankly this is where shadow IT is in danger of overwhelming the CIO as employees and departments create ‘workarounds’ sourcing their own solutions to problems. The CIO and his team will be blamed for impeding staff productivity, for lacking innovation, and for not delivering cutting edge mobile applications to the business. Ultimately, the danger is the enterprise will disengage with IT.
Today, the whole enterprise application ecosystem needs to be multi-channel and organisations must have a mobile-first strategy. IT needs to be able to create once for all devices automatically, utilising responsive web design in their strategy. Additionally, mobile is so fast moving and with new apps constantly being developed, the CIO must create an environment where change can be managed quickly and effectively.
Like it or not, mobile has become a de facto part of global business, and we are all completely dependent upon it. If I’ve not convinced you, just look at the stats again. Believe me, ‘use any device’ is the way forward in the enterprise, and CIOs must respond and respond fast.
OutSystems provides an open, high productivity application platform that makes it easy to create, deploy and manage enterprise mobile and web applications, helping IT deliver innovative business solutions fast.
