The enterprise mobility market may be considered close to saturation, but plenty of pain points remain, according to a new industry report.
The State of Enterprise Mobility survey, conducted by B2M Solutions, found more than half (51%) of workers polled reported experiencing at least one issue with their mobile devices per month which hindered their ability to do their job.
The study, which polled more than 550 US companies, also found a marked rise in workers who had taken days off because of mobility issues. 37% of those polled admitted they had taken at least one day off in the past 12 months because of stress at not being able to do their job relating to a mobile snafu.
Despite more than half of respondents saying they had at least one issue per month, four in five (80%) IT workers surveyed said only one in five end users report problems monthly. B2M mused this discrepancy was down to two factors; end users may not want to burden IT with what they perceive as folderol when they could technically work around the issue, and IT may not have the monitoring tools required to assess all solutions.
Devices can fail for a multitude of reasons, but a few key factors kept cropping up. Unreliable network connections were cited as the most frequent bugbear, according to 45% of those polled, ahead of battery failure (41%) or applications crashing or becoming unstable (40%).
More than half of those polled said their company had lost revenue and customers due to mobile problems. “It’s time for enterprise mobility to shift its management tactics and strategies to go beyond MDM and other traditional mobile management platforms,” Gary Lee, B2M chief revenue officer wrote in the report’s introduction. “The survey shows enterprises are losing customers, revenue and employees because of mobile downtime – and the hidden and visible costs to the enterprise of these outages is quite high.”
One recent example shows how a major organisation is rethinking its strategy. As reported by The Guardian, accounting firm KPMG is looking at revoking access to work mobile devices, with the policy holding predominantly for junior administrative and back office staff.
While the move appears to be based on financial constraints, commentators have argued that the move to a bring your own device (BYOD) policy would entail risk in terms of data protection and cybersecurity.
You can read the full B2M Solutions report here (email required).
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