Executive Summary

Enterprise mobility continues to transform businesses. Not only is it enabling organizations to better connect with customers and employees, it is also incentivizing them to fundamentally reimagine business models.

Buyers innately understand the value of enterprise mobility. It is much like “health food” which does not require any deliberation and is assumed to be beneficial. We believe this assumption prevents buyers from developing a meaningful business case for mobility initiatives and measure its true impact.

Various buying centers within enterprises are flush with funds to spend on these “next-generation”, seemingly cool initiatives. This further reduces the incentives of a strong business case. For long, buyers have relied on “feel good” factors to discuss mobility rather than real business drivers. Moreover, these feel good factors are rarely tracked or analyzed to understand the broader impact.

This report makes a case for enterprises to move beyond these “feel good” Return on Investments (RoI) measures and focus on real business drivers. The report focuses on:

• Defining enterprise mobility: There are multiple ways of defining enterprise mobility. Some of these are very restrictive, whereas others are too expansive. Everest Group focuses on four key dimensions to define enterprise mobility
• Mobility adoption: Enterprise mobility has incentivized business application providers to offer mobile solutions. This is a true indication that mobility has moved beyond vanity value to now focus on real business challenges
• “Feel good” RoI: Everest Group’s interaction with enterprise buyers suggests mobility initiatives are driven by "feel good" factors that are hard to quantify. Though not every benefit of mobility can be quantified, buyers must aspire to introduce as much structure and data as possible, to develop a strong business case
• Road ahead: Enterprise mobility will continue to grow. Its trinity with cloud and analytics will continue to create new avenues for businesses. However, to exploit this potential, buyers need to move beyond their traditional evaluation frameworks and focus on real business value

The most important aspect is to analyze the areas that can be transformed with enterprise mobility. This should be followed by a rigorous business value analysis. Key to enterprise mobility is not the end objective of developing a mobile application or the associated business process change, but the fundamental value derived from these investments.