Nick Jones, Gartner

In 2013, the mobile world offers more opportunity than ever before, coupled with more uncertainty than ever before. First the good news: mobile is the best opportunity for genuine innovation facing most organisations.

From a technology perspective, mobile devices and networks continue to become more capable and sophisticated. Already in 2013 we’ve seen quad core handsets, curved screens, flexible OLED screens, and a plethora of new devices which blur the traditional boundaries between smartphone, tablet and PC. By 2014, low-cost hardware will make smartphones even more affordable, pushing prices below $50 and opening up the world of apps to even more consumers. The smartphone is also finding new roles; apps are becoming a universal endpoint for monitoring and controlling consumer electronics and interfacing with the growing Internet of things. The US consumer electronics exhibition in January showed us a wide range of gadgets such as smart watches, health sensors, even forks that monitor how we eat, all of which communicate with mobile apps.

There really is an app for everything, and some organisations are using them in very creative ways. I’ve seen mobile games used for marketing in staid industries like financial services, or ideas such as motivational applications which use psychology to try to influence employee or consumer behaviour. However, few IT organisations have the ability to create such advanced apps or even to deliver the level of user experience and artistic design expected by staff or customers familiar with the best from app stores. So CIOs must find new skills and new partners.

The mobile market is driven by consumer products which weren’t designed for enterprise needs but have displaced traditional secure “enterprise” devices. In many organisations, the CIO has effectively lost control of mobile hardware as employees demand the latest gadgets and bring their own smartphones and tablets into the office. Gone are the simple days when employees used only two devices – a smartphone and a PC – which were easy to manage because they were owned by the enterprise. In a few years, I expect the average senior knowledge worker will use four-to-six different mobile devices, most of which will be personal and not corporate. Consumerisation and the “bring your own” phenomenon is a headache for CIOs, but some are finding ways to exploit it to reduce costs and increase employee satisfaction.

However, achieving this without compromising security is a challenge which is pushing them to adopt new technologies such as mobile device management (MDM) and containerisation, combined with new policies and procedures.

Application development is another area causing CIOs a lot of pain. Windows rules the PC world, but smartphones and tablets create a much more uneven landscape where most organisations will need to support three or more platforms for the foreseeable future. Technologies such as HTML5 and multiplatform development tools are essential for everyone, despite the fact that many of the most innovative tools come from small vendors which may not survive in the long-term. The challenges don’t end when the app has been developed, because the fragmentation of platforms like Android requires developers to test on 30 to 50 different devices to cover a reasonable proportion of their customers. Worse, testing doesn’t end when the app has been delivered into the store, because several new OS versions arrive every year, which often break existing apps.

In March, Gartner will run seminars in Cape Town and Johannesburg to explain all of these issues and many more, to help organisations profit from the opportunities of mobility.