“The pace of change hasn’t decreased within our tech vision of this year and when we surveyed business executives about this, 86% said that they anticipated that over the next three years that pace will either increase rapidly or at an unprecedented rate.”
Godolphin thinks that the level of challenge facing companies dealing with mobility is growing and many Accenture clients request support in this area. A particular issue that has come to light in recent times is the differing expectations of mobility from different generational groups.
Generational expectations
“There is a mismatch between generations’ expectations, especially in the workforce. In my day, if you got a laptop that was seen as a big perk, but now new people coming into the workforce have expectations about the type of digital tools and technologies they’ll be able to have and the flexibility with which they’ll be able to use them,” she said.
“Boundaries are being blurred and mobility is a key driver of this as I see it, so no longer are we setting our expectations by the one app we use or the one service we use, we’re actually setting our expectations over our best type of experience. What we want now is for that experience to run across different brands.”
As an example, she cites Spotify, where it is now common to see its service and app being super-distributed across a variety of different platforms and third party providers.
“You can now get into an Uber car and have your Spotify playlist playing as part of that booking of that car, becoming part of how Uber brands its service based on the customer’s experience. Spotify hasn’t changed its service but the expectation now is that I can access Spotify through other brands and that’s being driven by a level of expectation that’s cross pollinating into corporate culture.”
“There is a lot of pressure for organisations to deal with all of the different changes that are coming from the consumer sector, which of course is made up of people who are also employees.”
Behaviour sets
Godolphin makes the point that from Accenture’s point of view, mobility is less a technology and more a set of behaviours.
“When you look at the digital revolution or evolution, whichever is your preferred view, really mobility is the one big thing that you can point to that has dramatically changed the way we behave. As a result of it we change our minds more, we’re much more spontaneous, our expectations have increased ridiculously in terms of our access to information at a moment’s notice and that’s all been driven by this device in our hand that we never let out of our sight. Increasingly our lives are in those devices.”
Meanwhile a recently published whitepaper entitled “Enterprise Mobility Best Practices: MDM, Containerisation or Both?” from enterprise mobility specialist Airwatch says that MDM is still the preferred method for bring your own device (BYOD) security, but that other methods are growing in popularity.
“Companies have realised that both MDM and application-level management are still relevant for different device deployments, and in some cases, provide additional functionality and security if they coexist together on the same device,” said the report’s authors.
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