Reader Forum: Do more smart phones (and mobile applications) mean greater employee productivity?

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It’s a near universal truth in every business – regardless of size or industry – employee productivity contributes directly to success, growth and profitability. Giving your employees all of the tools and resources to do their work away from the office or their desk is an investment that will pay off at a compounding rate thanks to the productivity gains it can spur. In fact, equipping your workforce with smart phones could easily be among the savviest investment decisions your company will ever make.
Smart phones are becoming a critical component of the United States mobile market. According to recent data from The Nielsen Company, “Multipurpose smart phones that allow users to access the web and e-mail as well as run thousands of apps and share text and picture messages are now 25% of the U.S. mobile market.” Nielsen also predicts that by the end of 2011, smart phones will overtake feature phones in the United States. Businesses have a unique opportunity to put smart phones into the hands of employees and give them access to cloud-based corporate applications like salesforce.com, for example, as all signs suggest productivity will rise at every level of the business in kind. There’s no need to search for the source of the next growth spurt in employee productivity – smart phones are already blazing that trail.
United States businesses are coming off a period of rapid growth in employee productivity in 2009 and if corporations want to maintain these gains, they need to get smart phones into the hands of their knowledgeable workers. In fact, while productivity gains might be enough reason for most business to embrace smart phones, a report from Forrester Research concluded that when IT supports smart phones, employee collaboration rise. There is also something to be said about the competitive advantage businesses can achieve by giving employees on-demand access to critical data. Access to real-time information is paramount – a corporation simply won’t be competitive if it doesn’t give users access to corporate data from their mobile device.
And the pent-up demand is apparent, according to another recent report from Forrester Research. While only 11% of information workers use a smart phone at work, three times as many admit to using their personal smart phones for work. According to the report, those equipped with smart phones work an average of two more hours per week than pure office workers. In addition, research from Nielsen found that while desktop use of e-mail declined from 12% to 8%, e-mail use on mobile devices increased from 37% to 42%. With e-mail being a critical communication tool in business, allowing employees access to corporate e-mail on a mobile device is quickly becoming a requirement.
Ted Schadler, principal analyst at Forrester, pointed out the logic of unshackling work from location via smart phones. And with teleworking expected to grow to 63 million U.S. workers by 2016, according to the research, there’s even more reason to bolster your own corporate mobile strategy. “Giving information workers access to key corporate resources from any facility or from home and elsewhere raises the chances that they can find a key piece of information when it’s most valuable: at the point of decision-making,” he wrote. “And that translates into higher team productivity.”
Smart phones are essentially becoming app phones and with enterprise applications moving to the cloud at an incredible rate, granting and supporting corporate-wide mobile access to the cloud is becoming a no-brainer for many businesses. This trend was made crystal clear when Google Inc. (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt presented at Mobile World Congress earlier this year. The power of the cloud is growing so much that mobility is taking a front seat at the table of many firms, including the search giant.
During his keynote, Schmidt identified three factors that are paramount to winning in this space – computing, connectivity and the cloud. He also pointed to a recent phenomenon and shift at Google that he called “mobile first,” wherein essentially “the new rule is mobile first in everything.”
Still, even with all these benefits there is a dichotomy that exists because of the massive expense associated with smart phone use at the corporate level, as pointed out in a 2009 report from Gartner about potential corporate overspending on smart phones. While the interest and potential is clear, the daunting cost of smart phone adoption is also clearly holding back widespread deployments at many businesses. The result has been managers asking for smart phones for their teams, CFOs saying no due to the expense and IT caught in the middle looking for solutions to help scale deployments in a cost effective process. The good news though is that IT departments are finding the necessary software tools to initiate common IT policies across a comprehensive mobility strategy that dictates allowable devices, upgrade options, carrier plans and more. Through the establishment of mobility policies and budgets, costs can be controlled and made manageable.
In summary, the penetration of smart phones and 3G data usage among employees is taking off and the growth rate will only accelerate in the foreseeable future. Enterprise applications are no longer exclusive to the sit-down environment of an office workstation. They are now accessible and supported on employee smart phones. Employees need to access business applications and crucial messaging at all times wherever and whenever they might be conducting business. Smart phones equipped with access to cloud-based corporate apps can bridge that divide while IT departments with the latest management tools can keep their CFOs happy.
Tim Weingarten has been Chairman and CEO of Visage Mobile since 2008, guiding it to become a leading provider of enterprise mobility management tools. Weingarten brings extensive networking, wireless, consumer digital media, Internet infrastructure and broadband experience to Visage Mobile helping the company grow its revenue and secure a recent 4.5 million dollars in funding led by Qualcomm Inc. Prior to joining Visage Mobile, Weingarten was a General Partner at Worldview Technology Partners, venture capitalist firm. In addition to his board seat at Visage Mobile, Weingarten is a board member of Cogent Communications (CCOI), Ooma and Zoove.