Who will have the bigger IT budget?
Thursday, January 19th, 2012 John Gallagher, Sr. Public Relations Manager
In enterprise software the concept of “departmental” used to be a dirty word.
Product marketers would address a competitor’s offering as “just” departmental – translated as “niche” and “unable to scale.” But with the advent of mass adoption of consumer devices, the proliferation of the mobile Internet and the rise of cloud services, departmental is the next big thing.
At least that is one of Gartner Group’s predictions for 2012 as business managers are expected to increasingly take control of the IT budget.
“The Gartner Predicts 2012 special report addresses the continuing trend toward the reduction of control IT has over the forces that affect it. As users take more control of the devices they will use, business managers are taking more control of the budgets IT organizations have watched shift over the past few years. Moving forward, IT departments will find that they must coordinate activities in a much wider scope than they once controlled.”
This is aligned with some trends we’re seeing in enterprise mobility:
- IT professionals feel they were losing control of the mobile landscape: 41 percent of IT managers believed they had less control over their employees’ choice of devices than a year ago, and 37 percent felt it was about the same.
- As a result, Mobile device liability is shifting to the user: The mix of corporate-provisioned versus individually-liable has shifted. Today 58 percent of companies provision smartphones to their employees; this is down from nearly two-thirds a year ago. 42 percent of employees have individually-liable smartphones – they purchase and pay for their own devices.
- Employees are more tech savvy, and less reliant on IT: Most mobile workers described themselves as highly proficient when it comes to technology (69 percent), compared to six percent who rated themselves as fairly proficient or non-proficient. And mobile workers only contacted IT as a last resort (81 percent), while two percent had IT on speed dial.
- Yet “support” in general is the hot button for IT: This is likely the result of the difficulty in “hitting a moving target” — as lifecycles of each model of a mobile device are measured in months, not years. The highest level of frustration was in providing support for non-provisioned devices, followed by onboarding and ongoing support for these devices.
- And according to IT professionals, employees are contacting IT with more demanding tech support issues (especially since mobile employees are only going to IT as a last resort). 45 percent of IT departments stated that the IT problems were more complex than two years ago, while 27 percent found them the same, and only seven percent believed the issues were less complex than two years ago.
The shift is well underway, but for IT management we think this change represents opportunity.
Have a perspective? We have our Q1 Mobile Workforce Survey underway and we would like to hear from you. This quarter we are looking at Wi-Fi adoption, the social enterprise and multi-tasking.
And if you take our survey you will be entered into a drawling to win an iPad 2.
Tags: Mobile Control, Reports
