Mobile Strategies and Consumer Products Companies

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In February I worked with insiderResearch on an enterprise mobility survey.  We surveyed 602 companies.  I wrote a report (available for free here) on the general results of this survey.  I am now going to be digging deeper and reviewing the results by industry.  So stay tuned!  In this article I will review one set of results from the consumer products industry.

First a little background, 44 of the 602 companies were in the consumer products industry.  Seventy-five percent of these had annual revenues of more than $500 million.

Survey question:  How would you describe the mobile strategy at your organization?

• 36% (32% for all respondents) - Enterprise wide - governing all applications and devices
• 24% (28% for all respondents) - we have NO mobile strategy
• 24% (24% for all respondents) - experimental, each business unit and group does it's own thing with little or no oversight
• 17% (16% for all respondents) - distributed, each line of business or location sets it's own strategy

These findings are revealing to me.  Sixty-five percent of these consumer products companies don't have a corporate wide enterprise mobility strategy.  This opens the doors to silo strategies, redundant efforts and costs, waste and inefficient IT environments.  It also makes it very hard to standardize on mobile security, support and mobile application management.

Let's now analyze the results from the consumer products industry, and compare it to all of the 602 responses.  Thirty-six percentage of consumer products companies have an enterprise wide mobile strategy that governs all applications and devices, but only 32% of the entire list does.  That suggests there is a slightly higher level of enterprise mobility maturity in this industry, than the average.  However, the rest of the results are nearly the same.

The fact that 75% of these companies have annual revenues of over $500 million, and 65% still don't have a corporate wide enterprise mobility strategy, bodes well for a mobile strategy consultant like me, but not for the potential chaos that is coming to the IT organization if corporate wide standards, frameworks and platforms are not implemented fast.

***I also conducted an enterprise mobility survey of 118 companies in Q4 2011 with different survey questions.  You can get the results of that survey for free here.

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Kevin Benedict, Independent Mobile Industry Analyst, Consultant and SAP Mentor Alumnus

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Full Disclosure: I am an independent mobility analyst, consultant and blogger. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.