Mobility 2003: When Will Mobility Add Strategic Value?

• 55% say employee demand drives adoption of mobile technologies
• 46% support instant messaging over mobile devices
• 75% say mobile devices greatly increase security risks
• 37% say mobile technologies let them better capture and analyze data
• 12% say mobile efforts have not yet produced business value

Mobile technologies are here to stay—indeed, their use is growing rapidly. But are CIOs seeing the full range of business benefits? Not yet, according to the almost 500 top technology executives who responded in January to our second annual survey on mobile technologies. Just 20 percent of respondents found them highly valuable, with proven ROI, and about 70 percent said they were somewhat valuable. E-mail is not only the most popular mobile application; it’s also the app that overwhelmingly delivered the most business value—primarily in the form of productivity gains through better communication. That’s good news. The problem is that strategic benefits derived from access to internal databases or integration with corporate portals have been much more elusive. Indeed, more than a quarter feel that mobility’s complexity and support problems have not yet been worth the business value achieved. The top concerns: high cost and lack of security. But there’s no turning back: More than 80 percent plan to increase their use of mobile technology in the next 12 months.