A recent study released by IDC Australia found that Australia has dropped to fifth place in enterprise mobility maturity last year in the Asia Pacific region, excluding Japan.
‘IDC Mobility MaturityScape Benchmark: Enterprise Mobility in Australia, 2016’ uncovered that only a few Australian organisations are at the advanced stage of mobility maturity, with dedicated platforms and architectures enabling mobile as a primary usage mode. About half of Australian enterprises are still at the nascent stage of mobility maturity, which the IDC defines as being ad hoc or opportunistic in their approach to enterprise mobility.
Just one in 15 Australian organisations is using mobility as a competitive differentiator and new business model enabler, while most organisations continue to employ mobility initiatives in an isolated, uncoordinated fashion, implemented in silos and lacking coordination between IT and the lines of business.
Sabharinath Bala, senior research manager, IDC said that integration of mobility into the extended business application ecosystem is inevitable.
“The enterprise mobility ecosystem continues to expand beyond mobile devices and mobile enterprise applications as organisations create newer, unconventional use cases, such as smart devices, wearables, connected vehicles, and mobile-enabled machine-to-machine communication,” he said.
Bala said that as Australian businesses move up the mobility maturity scale they take a more holistic view of mobility in their business strategy. With this, interest extends to all aspects of mobile applications, including their procurement, development and management.
“Enterprise mobile strategy needs augment other third platform pillars, especially cloud and analytics, with the Internet of Things effectively extending the business value of enterprise mobility,” said Bala, looking to the future – a future he said must include wearables and augmented reality in order to futureproof organisations.
The benchmark report is designed to help enterprises assess their current enterprise mobility maturity in relation to their region and industry and to discover and address gaps in their mobility strategies and investment.
