Though many organisations consider mobile devices to be business game-changers, there is no clear link between mobility and productivity.
So said Keith Jones, strategic business development manager at Unison, speaking at an enterprise communications management strategy workshop yesterday, in Johannesburg.
Jones referred to a JSE-listed company that gave its employees iPads, but of late has reportedly faced declining revenue. He blamed the local company for jumping onto the iPad bandwagon without doing its homework first.
“Productivity is behavioural and mobility is technical,” Jones said. “As an example, employees can pretend to be productive on an iPad, while in actual fact they are doing something else.”
According to Jones, increased technology also means increased complexity, and increased costs to manage it. However, he also pointed out that convergence is making communications easier, faster and more flexible.
“The combination of intelligent devices with more interactive, responsive media promises great business enablement. However, lack of proper roadmaps or benchmarking can make these new additions challenging to manage using conventional methods.”
He also noted that these new technologies mean much is happening outside the traditional business domain, which is invisible and untraceable by traditional business monitoring tools.
The majority of organisations that are using mobile devices cannot measure how productive these gadgets are, said Jones.
“This can make planning extremely difficult. With no predefined model of what is expected in place, it becomes impossible to identify abnormalities or even efficiencies within the business,” he explained.
“Communication devours huge chunks of financial and technological resources, yet many organisations are unable to account for how these are spent.”
Jones urged companies that are using mobile devices to deploy tools that enable them to accurately account for, allocate and recover expenditure related to each communication medium.
“Organisations must have a single view of the business, or a drill down to provide a single view of the user across all platforms of communication. They should also have a 'normal' profile of a user based on modelling, enabling the business to measure productivity more accurately,” he concluded.
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