Mobile first and the future of the workplace

The shift to the ‘mobile-first’ enterprise will have as big an impact as the introduction of the web. There are 1.6 billion smartphones alone in the market and that number is set to see further step change growth through multidevice ownership, including tablets and new wearable devices such as glasses, sensors and watches enabled by machine-to-machine (M2M) technology. This proliferation of devices, and the notion that they are a new digital limb that is never more than an arm’s reach away, means that the first point of contact between an organisation and its employees, customers and partners will increasingly be through a mobile channel. This is the reality of the mobile-first world, and it is why mobility is such an important part of the enterprise IT stack.

In less than a decade, the idea of asking your workforce to go to an office to use a tethered network device will be as much an anathema as the green screen is to most of us now. Mobility is the future - businesses that understand that and move fast will see competitive advantage, providing a better customer experience and more efficient, agile working practices for their employees.

Mobility and multiscreening

Smart mobile technology continues to evolve in many different directions - as the smartphone and tablet markets continue to grow, mobile enterprise apps (ie, internal, employee-facing apps) take off, laptop and tablet form factors increasingly converge and the market for wearable devices gains scale.

Mobility is a democratiser of technology, as seen with the consumerisation trend in enterprise IT: the average man in the street is having an impact on what is used in the workplace. Apple and Google are well ahead of the rest of the competition in the battle for scale, ensuring that major OEMs focus on the consumer market first and foremost and creating a secondary channel into the enterprise through bring your own device (BYOD). And this BYO concept does not only apply to hardware manufacturers as cloud productivity software vendors provide free, easy-to-use services that consumers can make use of in both their personal lives and at work. Bring your own app (BYOA) behaviour is evident as employees source their own applications to use at work - DropBox and Skype are typical examples of applications finding their way into the enterprise through BYOA, not only through mobile device usage but certainly encouraged by it.

IT departments need to understand and exploit this new, consumerised behaviour. For most workers, especially knowledge workers, their IT set-up is becoming a complex multiscreen environment where individual users have access to multiple different devices, running on different operating systems, and which may be either personally or corporate owned. The use cases and behaviours around these devices will also differ: a home PC is typically a shared resource - for example, with multiple members of a family using it for a variety of purposes, while a mobile device usually only has one user.

Workspace is changing

The emergence of mobility and the cloud means that the way we think about the space in which we work is changing. There is no longer a need to be tethered to a particular location or terminal, as tools, content and services are more easily accessible through the cloud and from multiple device types. So remote working and teleworking is easier than ever - but the mobile-first environment also has an impact on office space.

For the majority of businesses, the need for office space is not going away. It is possible to conduct more meetings remotely of course, but face-to-face contact and interactions with clients and colleagues is, and will continue to be, an important part of doing business. Having a central hub to meet and work makes sense, even if not all employees are based there all the time; and as travel is expensive, it makes sense to work from a single location. But as remote working means that not every employee will be in the office every day, businesses can make better use of their office space. Hot-desking and breakout areas are becoming increasingly common, for example, offering more flexible working practices.

As the manner of office working changes and employees become more mobile, there will be heavy demands placed on the campus WLAN. The increasing number of mobile devices used by both employees and guests creates a bandwidth and access challenge, slowing down the network - and if this trend continues, networks will not be able to cope with the demand, drastically reducing the efficiency of every worker in the office. Upgrading office Wi-Fi networks in order to provide the required capacity will become a priority issue for enterprise IT departments.

Be an enabler of change

It is imperative for IT to embrace the future outlined here and think about how they can help their business move to the new mobile first workplace - where PCs and large-screen computers are no longer the only devices employees want to use to do their jobs. Employee behaviour is evolving, with innovation, new apps and devices being used across all areas of an organisation - and IT’s role has to evolve with it. IT needs to be a function that adapts to employee behaviour and enables new ways of working, not a central command-and-control operation. There is a balancing act here: employees have a better sense of what is required to get the job done, and if they see a tool that looks appropriate they’ll jump on it; however, very few individuals outside of the IT department will look at factors such as cost of ownership or consider the governance implications.

Many businesses will turn to platforms to help manage this hugely complex new environment, and they will be looking for solution providers with roadmaps, scale and credibility. Providing the right tools is an immediate way for IT to demonstrate value to and engage with the business, but if IT doesn’t act quickly enough it risks obsolescence. Individual employees and line-of-business managers are already bypassing the IT organisation if they’re not getting what they need, creating a large ‘Shadow IT’ environment. This has obvious risks in terms of data security, so IT needs to demonstrate that it can be the right body to manage such activity. Smart IT departments are aligning with lines of business and positioning themselves as being central to the drive to transform business practices, looking at platforms and workplace management tools to manage the device and app life cycle in the multiOS, multidevice environment.

*Richard Absalom is a Senior Analyst with Ovum’s Enterprise Mobility and Productivity practice, particularly focusing on mobile consumerisation. His research examines the impact that mobile devices and applications designed for consumers are having on the corporate environment.

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