Mobility in India: Depressingly Dismal

The mobile penetration in India is a phenomenal success story. Everybody,

right down from people at the 'bottom of the pyramid” to its pinnacle today own

a mobile or a smartphone. It has become a part and parcel of everybody's lives.

So much so that mobile phones and smartphones have become a potential channel of

communication, which can be leveraged in a big way. On the other hand, the use

of laptops and netbooks by Indian enterprises is also growing. Both mobile and

laptop are a formidable combination that can truly enable a mobile enterprise.

But is that really happening? Are organizations truly embracing these two

products along with other solutions to make their employees productive on the

move? We surveyed 70+ IT decision makers from large Indian enterprises (having

500 or more employees) to find out, and unfortunately, the results were not very

encouraging. The results clearly indicate that Indian organizations have a long

way to go before they achieve true mobility.

We analyzed the usage trends of laptops/netbooks and mobile/shartphones

across Indian enterprises, the challenges being faced, and what they're planning

to do in the future.

Mobility Strategy



First the good news--at least 70% of our survey's respondents had a mobility

strategy in place. Given the fact that laptops and smartphones have become so

cheap, one would have expected a resounding and loud “Yes” from a majority of

the crowd, but that's ok. Even the 70% figure is decent enough. Hopefully, the

remaining 30% would eventually follow.

We focused on two key aspects of a mobility strategy-laptops/netbooks and

smartphones. No mobility strategy can be formed without factoring in these two

product categories.

Encouraging the move toward mobility with Laptops/Netbooks



Having a mobility strategy is one thing, but what are those 3-4 key things

you could do to encourage mobility in the workplace? We asked our respondents

and got some very interesting responses, some go in favor of a mobility

strategy, while others are a complete washout!

a. Replace Office PCs with laptops/netbooks: One way to increase the

adoption of mobility is to replace office PCs with laptops, so that more

employees are able to work from anywhere. We found that a majority (nearly 42%)

of large Indian enterprises have some sort of a plan to replace at least 10-12%

of their PCs in office with laptops or netbooks. Another 21% were slightly

bolder and were ready to replace anywhere from 25 to 50% of their existing

office PCs with laptops and netbooks. Unfortunately, a good 33% didn't have any

plans of doing so, but the bottomline here is that there is a tendency to

replace office PCs with laptops amongst a majority of large Indian enterprises.

b. Encourage personal laptops to work: Another way to enhance mobility

in your enterprise is to encourage employees to bring their own personal laptops

to work. This would transfer the cost of these assets to your employees, thereby

saving you some capex. But are you ready to support these laptops if you do

that? Apparently not. In our survey, 61% of the respondents said that they don't

allow employees to bring their personal laptops to office. Another 28% allowed

personal laptops in office, but didn't support them. Only around 8% fully

supported their employees' personal laptops.

c. Encourage working from home/anywhere: The true meaning of mobility

is to facilitate employees to work from home or anywhere. Unfortunately, Indian

enterprises are still not as forthcoming in doing so. For instance, the most

basic requirement to work from anywhere is to provide a high-speed data card

along with the laptop to your employees. Surprisingly, only 55% of large Indian

enterprises provide this facility. With the most basic requirement not

fulfilled, how can one can expect other techniques to be widely adopted? Only

39% of the respondents to our survey said that they bear a part of their

employees' home broadband bill, while another 24% helped their employees

purchase a PC or laptop for their homes. A mere 6% of the respondents said that

they actually incentivize their employees to work from outside the office.

There's still a good 21% who don't even encourage working from home for their

employees.

With such low adoption for even basic requirements of working from anywhere,

the more bolder techniques can be comfortably considered to be a distant dream.

Apparently, Gartner predicts that enterprises will gradually shift the ownership

of their IT assets (PCs and laptops) to their employees over the next few years.

Well, it doesn't look as if it's going to happen anytime soon in India at least.

Only 7% of our respondents said that they're likely to shift the ownership of

their employees' PCs/laptops to employees in easy to pay EMIs.

Smartphones/Mobiles and enterprise mobility



There have been enough debates and counter-debates on the pros and cons of

using smartphones in the workplace, and just about everybody is aware of the

same today. We all know that there are so many different phone models, each with

a different OS, screen size, and features. We all know that there are very few

common apps across all smartphones. But handing out official smartphones and

PDAs to the upper management is not the answer. It's now high time that all

these debates are put to rest and this potential channel is put to some good use

instead of being wasted like this. We're saying this because the results of

official smartphone usage in the workplace was not very encouraging. Let's have

a look.

The current state: The state of smartphone/PDA usage in the workplace

for official use is even more depressing than the results of enabling tele-commuting

with laptops and netbooks. Organizations still largely issue 'official'

smartphones/PDAs to the upper management (49% of our respondents said that),

while another 22% don't use any apps at all for smartphones and PDAs. A mere 19%

said that they use a mix of official and personal smartphones in the workplace.

A dismal 3% of the organizations had extended productivity apps to personal

smartphones of employees, while another 3% had issued official smartphones and

PDAs to most employees in their organization. Considering that just about every

employee, right from those at the 'bottom of the pyramid' to those at the

pinnacle, owns a mobile/smartphone today, these statistics are anything but

encouraging.

Accessing current business apps over smartphones: Whatever little

extension of apps has happened of business apps to smartphones has happened

largely for internal employees. 43% of the respondents said this. Another 27%

didn't have any apps support for smartphones. 29% had extended apps access to

their customers, vendors, and partners. As expected, email is the most popular

business app on smartphones, with 46% of the respondents having extended access

to it. The next most popular application is miles away from the first

one-productivity apps like Office Suites. Only 11% of the respondents had made

it accessible on smartphones. Another 18% had made their ERP and CRM apps

accessible over smartphones. The rest are too low to mention, but you can check

out the graphs to get an idea.

Mobility apps deployed: The state of enterprise mobility deployment is

even worse than extending current apps to smartphones. 36% of the respondents to

our survey didn't have any mobility apps deployed at all. Another 16% had done

sales force automation, while another 13% had done field force automation.

Another 20% had deployed fleet management, supply chain automation, and location

based services. The rest had done other types of deployments.

Mobility apps planned: Usually, when I've done these surveys in the

past on other aspects of IT, I've received a very encouraging response to the

future deployment scenarios of that area. Things in enterprise mobility however

are a little different. For one, 27% of the respondents had no plans to deploy

enterprise mobility apps. Another 21% had plans to deploy sales force automation

solutions, while location based services were of interest to 13% of the

respondents. The rest can be seen in the graph. Possibly as the usage of

smartphones increases in the workplace, organizations will take more interest in

these areas. Another possibility is that organizations don't understand or

realize the potential benefits of these mobility applications.

The future of smartphone usage



All this made us wonder whether smartphones in the workplace had a future at

all? Thankfully, 85% of the organizations said that their usage is likely to

increase in their organizations. Hopefully we'll see a light at the end of the

tunnel...eventually!

Issues and challenges in enterprise mobility



Bringing enterprise mobility to the workplace has its own set of challenges,

as we found out from the responses to our open ended question on the matter.

Here's a summary of the thorns you'll have to pluck from your path to bringing

enterprise mobility in the workplace. Most of these are pretty much

self-explanatory, and have therefore been given as points.

Security Issues



The first concern that's often highlighted while discussing enterprise

mobility is that of security. So we asked our survey respondents to list down

the security concerns they're facing in bringing enterprise mobility in their

respective organizations. Here's a list of the hurdles you could face:

• Securing physical devices and the information on them
• Access control of endpoints
• Implementing uniform security standards across mobile devices
• Controlling applications on mobile units
• Identity management issues
• Stolen/misplaced/lost devices
• Data loss prevention
• Wiping off data in lost/damaged devices
• Training users to password protect their mobile devices
• Authentication issues
• Data transfer through Bluetooth
• Connectivity to PCs through USB or other ports.
• Multiple OS/mobile platforms
• Malware on mobile devices
• Timely deactivation of logins for employees who quit the organization
• Monitoring access logs through VPN
• End to end encryption of data
• Challenges in implementing a uniform security code across mobile devices

Service Providers Issues: Support from region-wise service providers

for mobility services; connectivity issues-speed and reliability, GPRS services

availability and cost; non-availability of ISPs and resources at the last mile

to charge and empower connectivity to activate devices.

Applications Issues: App compatibility across so many mobile devices;

apps are not user friendly; Version management of apps and OSs on various mobile

platforms; lack of clarity on which apps can be used well in the field or are

required to be used in an "always on" mode; Screen size of mobile devices, e.g.

fitting a large ERP screen onto a small smartphone screen.

Users Issues: Gaining user acceptance, Supporting mobile users as

their numbers grow, people treating it as a status symbol instead of a gadget of

convenience, determining the eligibility criteria and business requirement,

Budget constraints in providing mobility to such a huge staff, educating Sr.

managers on device usage

Infrastructure and support Issues: Upgrades to infrastructure

required, like firewall, Windows AD, BlackBerry Server, etc to support

enterprise mobility, patch management; turnaround time for service/repairs,

supporting device diversity, Synchronizing connectivity between devices and

server, handling uncertainty in technologies, cost of replacing lost devices,

resource tracking and accountability, high cost of obsolescence.