Two-Thirds of Enterprises Will Adopt a Mobile Device Management Solution for Corporate Liable Users Through 2017

Over the next five years, 65 percent of enterprises will adopt a mobile device management (MDM) solution for their corporate liable users, according to Gartner, Inc. With the increased functionality of smartphones, and the increasing popularity of tablets, much of the network traffic and corporate data that was once the primary domain of enterprise PCs is now being shifted to mobile devices.

Gartner predicts that through 2017, 90 percent of enterprises will have two or more mobile operating systems to support. In the past year, many companies have moved to Apple's iOS as their main mobile device platform, with others to follow over the next 12 to 18 months. As enterprises continue to offer multiplatform support, and new platforms -- such as Windows 8 --continue to emerge, MDM needs will continue to grow.

As one of the fastest-growing enterprise devices in the past 18 months, tablets are a further driving force for enterprises adopting MDM. Most companies and users are supporting the tablet for limited usage, typically for email and personal information management (PIM) functions. However, users are pushing for more enterprise applications to be supported on the tablet, usually through either enterprise or application provider development. As more of these native apps become available, and as remote access technology improves, more enterprise content will be stored on these devices. Users are already synchronizing corporate content into public clouds for later retrieval on the devices.

Gartner believes that mobile device proliferation is inevitable and the only way that IT staff can maintain control is by separating mobile computing devices into three distinct device classes: trusted standard devices provided by the company, tolerated devices and non-supported devices. In this scenario, users are given a predefined list of supported technologies in each class, along with a budget for the projected amount that each selection consumes. Users can optimize the technologies according to their requirements without exceeding the budget. Expense limits and spending caps by individuals bypass the need to rely on subjective interpretations of "reasonable use."

More information on Mobile Device Management and IT can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com

SupportIndustry.com's Support Metrics Snapshot: How Contact Centers are Performing in 2012

SupportIndustry.com's 2012 Service and Support Metrics survey, sponsored by Aptean, represented a perfect trifecta: support performance  increased overall, as its complexity continued to increase, and as an increasing amount of this support volume continues to migrate to support channels other than the phone. Improvements were particularly substantial in areas such as speed to answer, where top-end results increased by nearly a factor of two, and average abandonment rate. E-mail response rates, measured for the first time in 2012, show a substantial number answered within the first hour.

 

Key Metrics Include:

Average speed to answer for phone-based support: A whopping 70.2% answer the phone in 30 seconds or less, nearly double 2011's rate of 37%. At the other end of the spectrum, 7.9% wait more than a minute - less than a third of 2011's rate of 22.8%, but more than twice the 3.2% in 2009.

 

Average speed to answer for e-mail support: Nearly a third of respondents (30.6%) answer e-mails within one hour, and over three-quarters (75.1%) respond within six hours. Just two respondents (1.9%) state that they take over 24 hours to respond. (This was a new metric surveyed for 2012.)

 

Average hold time: 65.3% of respondents have hold times of a minute or less, slightly more than 2011's figures of 58%. The percentage of those with no hold time at holds steady at 21.9% this year, while 79.9% pick up within two minutes.

 

Average abandonment rate: The percentage of respondents with a rate of less than 5% improved from 59% to 65.2% of respondents, with a nearly identical 23.7% experiencing a rate of less than 1%. Just seven respondents had average abandonment rates of over 10%, and only one was over 15%, numbers that are very similar to those of the past two years.

 

Average number of e-mails exchanged to resolve a support request: Just over half (51.4%) of respondents handle e-mail support requests within 1 to 3 e-mails, nearly identical to last year, while most of the others (26.7% of the total) resolve an average request within 4 to 6 e-mails.

 

Escalation and FCR: 23.7% of people escalate less than 10% of their transactions to level 2, a substantial decrease from the 30.4% of the past two years, while those needing to escalate more than half of their issues more than doubled from 4.7% in 2011 to 10.8% in 2012. Along similar lines, just over half of respondents (53.3%) measure first-call resolution (FCR) levels

 

Costs of support transactions: Costs by channel have remained very similar overall to 2011 figures. As with last year, a little more than half (57.3%) of respondents reported costs ranging up to US$24 for phone transactions, with close to 30% reporting average costs of less than US$10 per transaction. For e-mail, over 48.4% kept costs under US $10. Costs of web chat did see median values increase from under US$5 to the $5-9 range in 2012, a sign that more complex transactions were moving to this medium. The percentage of respondents reporting average costs above $24/transaction were 26.6%, 13.7%, and 9.8% for phone, e-mail, and chat/IM respectively, all similar to 2011 figures.

Click here to view the full survey 14 page report includes a detailed analysis of the entire survey results.

Every Budget is Becoming an IT Budget

Twelve years ago technology spending outside of IT was 20 percent of total technology spending; it will become almost 90 percent by the end of the decade, according to Gartner, Inc. Much of this change is being driven by the digitization of companies’ revenue and their services.

The Nexus of Forces is leading this transformation. The Nexus is the convergence and mutual reinforcement of social, mobile, cloud and information patterns that drive new business scenarios..

Organizations are digitizing segments of business, such as moving marketing spend from analog to digital, or digitizing the research and development budget. Secondly, organizations are digitizing how they service their clients, in order to drive higher client retention. Thirdly, they are turning digitization into new revenue streams. Gartner analysts said this is resulting in every budget becoming an IT budget.

To address these changes, organizations will create the role of a Chief Digital Officer as part of the business unit leadership, which will become a new seat at the executive table. Gartner predicts that by 2015, 25 percent of organizations will have a Chief Digital Officer.

The forces of cloud, social, mobile and information are reconfiguring how people work and live. It’s a world in which business and personal lives are intertwined. A world with fewer commands and control restrictions that stifle productivity and innovation.

However, there is serious work that needs to be done. IT leaders need to make sure they have policies and procedures in place to respond to the new Nexus-driven threats. They must counter cyberattacks, and anticipate new attacks from new sources at a high scale. They will need to respond to “reputation” warfare and defend against social media “mercenaries”. They will also invest in new technologies that support employee-owned devices such as mobile device management, containerization and virtualization.

IT leaders also need to anticipate and plan for the coming wave of government interventions and regulations. As information technology becomes pervasive in all operations, regulations from the analog world will come to the digital world.

CEOs want their CIOs to make their impact felt where the enterprise meets the outside world. They want the CIO to unleash the forces that will differentiate their business. They don’t want the CIO spending all of their time automating the back office.

More information on IT budgets can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com

CIO Survey Reveals IT Leaders Struggle to Meet Big Demand for Enterprise App Testing, Development and Rollouts Next Year

Delphix, a provider of agile data management, announced the results of a survey of corporate IT leaders fielded by IDG Research to garner insights about plans, IT budgets and business goals for enterprise application development initiatives during the next twelve months. The survey polled 108 top-level IT executives at large global enterprises between August 30 and September 28, 2012. It exposes a growing problem for IT organizations struggling to keep pace with demand for an increasing number of enterprise application projects during the next 12 months.

The vast majority of IT leaders (86 percent) view enterprise app projects as a critical or strategic priority. On average, $173 million per enterprise has been allocated specifically for application projects in 2013, which equates to 41 percent of the average $432 million IT budget of the organizations surveyed. Yet, two thirds of respondents indicate that it's extremely or very challenging to deliver these applications on time or on budget. In fact, for the enterprise apps currently in development, an average of 28 projects are delayed and/or over budget.

Enterprise App Development Project Challenges

With about 41 percent of their IT budget to spend on enterprise app development projects related to business operations and analysis and an average of 46 new enterprise apps to deploy, 94 percent of IT executives survey admitted their organization finds it challenging to deliver these projects on time and on budget. About 76 percent of IT executives note that this high difficulty of staying on time and on budget has remained largely the same or gotten worse; only 24 percent indicate that it's become easier.

Often the difficulty lies in the earlier stages of deployment. Roughly one-half (48 percent) indicated their toughest stage is development, while another 38 percent said their toughest stage is testing. Nearly half of IT executives believe this is because of the length of time required to test apps, the resistance they encounter from end users, and the limited skill-sets of their IT employees. Pile these on top of budget constraints and the result is 65 percent of IT executives who find deploying enterprise applications to be extremely or very challenging.

Survey Respondent Profile

-- 100 percent are the primary decision maker or a key influencer/contributor in setting strategies and budgets related to enterprise application initiatives.

-- Average overall IT budget for 2013 (including business spending): $423 million.

-- The average company size of respondent organizations is 27,659 employees.

-- Within the organization, 52 percent hold a CIO/CTO title, 38 percent have titles of Executive VP, SVP, VP or General Manager, and 10 percent have a CSO or CISO title.

-- Top industries represented: 22 percent banking/financial services/insurance; 14 percent healthcare; nine percent technology; eight percent public sector/nonprofit (including government and education); seven percent information, media and entertainment; seven percent manufacturing/auto/industrial.

More information on service and support can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com

Employers Share Most Unusual Excuses Employees Gave for Calling In Sick

Playing hooky isn’t just for Ferris Bueller. In the past year, 30 percent of workers have called in sick when not actually ill, keeping on par with previous years. Sick days, legitimate or otherwise, also become more frequent around the winter holidays, with nearly one-third of employers reporting more employees call in sick during the holiday season.

The study was conducted online by Harris Interactive^© from August 13 to September 6, 2012 and included 2,494 hiring managers and human resource professionals and 3,976 workers across industries and company sizes.

Excuses, Excuses

Some workers come up with slightly more colorful explanations for their absences. When asked to share the most memorable excuses, employers reported the following real-life examples:

-- Employee’s sobriety tool wouldn't allow the car to start

-- Employee forgot he had been hired for the job

-- Employee said her dog was having a nervous breakdown

-- Employee’s dead grandmother was being exhumed for a police investigation

-- Employee’s toe was stuck in a faucet

-- Employee said a bird bit her

-- Employee was upset after watching “The Hunger Games”

-- Employee got sick from reading too much

-- Employee was suffering from a broken heart

-- Employee’s hair turned orange from dying her hair at home

 

More information on the people issues in service and support can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com

RSA Research Tackles Mounting Risks from Mobile Devices in the Enterprise

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, released a new researchreport from the Security for Business Innovation Council (SBIC) that addresses the continued surge of consumer mobile devices in the enterprise and shares security leaders' insights on how to manage the fast-changing mobility risks while maximizing business opportunities.  

Mobile threats are developing quickly and technologies keep shifting creating new security holes.  As more and more consumer devices access corporate networks and store corporate data, potentially devastating consequences range from the loss or leakage of valuable intellectual property to brand damage if fraudulent access results in a high-profile security breach. The Council consensus is that the time is now for enterprises to integrate risk management into their mobile vision. The potential benefits include increased agility, improved productivity, faster sales, and reduced costs. Capitalizing on the business opportunities of mobile computing is only possible if enterprises know the risks and how to manage them. 

In the report, the Council presents five strategies for building effective, adaptable mobile programs:

Establish mobile governance – Organizations should engage cross-functional teams to set clear ground rules. Every mobile project should start by defining business goals, including expectations of cost savings or revenue generation, and by establishing the level of risk that the organization is willing to accept to achieve those goals.

Create an action plan for the near-term – Mobile security technologies are fast-moving and, in many cases, too nascent to allow organizations to make long-term mobile security investments. The Council lays out several stop gap measures and key steps to take over the next 12-18 months.

Build core competencies in mobile app security – Knowing how to design mobile apps in a way that protects corporate data is absolutely critical, yet many information security teams do not have the necessary level of expertise. The Council emphasizes it's not just about bolting on security, but requires a careful examination of the app's overall functionality and architecture, and they provide key design criteria.  

Integrate mobility into long-term vision – Numerous trends are affecting long-term risk management planning. Organizations need to update their approach to security including risk-based, adaptive authentication; network segmentation; data-centric security controls; and cloud-based gateways.

Expand mobile situational awareness – Corporate security teams should deepen and continually refresh their understanding of the mobile ecosystem.

More information on mobility and the enterprise can be found at www.SupportIndustry.com