The age of mobile enterprise collaboration. Are we there yet?

There’s no question that the rise of mobile technology has led to a dramatic shift in the traditional office landscape. Today, the sea of office cubicles has given way to a mobile, more distributed workforce with many employees now relying on their mobile devices as their primary computing platform. Given this change, it is now more important than ever for IT managers to integrate a robust mobile UC solution into company operations.

But have we reached the age where mobility has truly become synonymous with enterprise-wide, real-time collaboration? According to a recent market research report by harmon.ie, we still have a ways to go. The report, titled “The State of Mobile Enterprise Collaboration,” states that there is a significant disconnect between IT departments and business professionals when it comes to perceived availability of mobile collaboration tools. On top of this, many employees still use mobile UC primarily for basic personal productivity tasks like checking email, company calendars and contact directories. Mobile collaboration takes advantage of the increasingly common mobile device’s ability to support audio, video, and screen sharing. With these abilities it enables multi-party conferencing in real time across different network types and technologies allowing remote participants to collaborate with those in a traditional office environment.

According to Yaacov Cohen, CEO of harmon.ie, “Enterprises need to move well beyond the current focus on personal productivity. In today’s competitive market, giving workers the ability to exchange emails, share files or send instant messages simply isn’t enough. Enterprises need to extend collaboration initiatives to encompass multi-modal, real-time collaboration in order to streamline projects and complete critical business processes.”

Let’s take a look at some of the report’s major findings:

Building it does not necessarily mean that they will come

• Less than half of business respondents are aware of a mobile device policy in their company, but 83 percent of IT respondents claim to have one in place.
• File sharing, updating files, managing tasks/projects and instant messaging are the most common internal and external collaboration activities enabled on mobile devices. Only a third of employees are aware of these capabilities.
• When asked to describe their own IT organizations in terms of collaboration maturity, 21 percent of IT professionals describe themselves as “innovators,” while 7 percent of respondents on the business side considered their company’s mobile collaboration innovative.
• Less than 32 percent of business respondents report having the ability to collaborate via mobile devices, outside of company walls, while IT reports much higher mobile enablement — a consistent 20 percent gap in capabilities perceived across all categories for external collaboration.

Perhaps the most glaring underlying factor in this report is the simple lack of communication and understanding between IT departments and their business counterparts about the critical role that mobile collaboration platforms play keeping businesses competitive in the digital age.

However, the silver lining is that there is still tremendous opportunity ahead for widespread adoption of mobile collaboration tools. The report also states that 2015 is seen as the Year of Enterprise Collaboration with IT respondents expecting Microsoft to keep innovating and enabling businesses across the world to make productivity on the go a business reality — followed by Google and Apple.

As we jump into 2015, IntelePeer is fully equipped to support enterprise collaboration across all the market leading systems.

With IntelePeer’s SIP Trunking as part of a collaboration solution, companies can leverage secure, high quality, on-demand communications with mobile users and with other businesses, allowing both sides to communicate and collaborate seamlessly.