The expectations of an increasingly connected workforce have resulted in strong demand for enterprise mobility, with IDC predicting that this year, 35% of large businesses will use mobile application development platforms to deploy mobile apps across their organisations.
Meanwhile, a new survey by Gartner has found that, in response to new digital opportunities, UK CIOs now plan to spend more time liaising with other parts of the organisation, including other C-suite executives, business unit leaders and customers.
However, as well as providing employees with access to documents and applications across multiple devices, CIOs and IT departments must also carefully control the use of cloud applications – without compromising data security.
IT Mobility – up on the agenda
"Ultimately, the purpose of mobility should be to support collaboration and seamless working," said Hiten Vadukul, Enterprise Architect at the global fitness chain Virgin Active.
"As part of our workplace strategy, we are looking to standardise the user experience across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
"In the near future, we expect that the adoption of cloud-based solutions such as Office 365 will reduce deployment times and ensure we are always on the same software version across all devices."
Collaborative approach to product development
"The consumer market has changed a lot in recent years," observed David Stanley, Head of IS Operations at the online rail ticket vendor, thetrainline.com.
"Technology users have come to expect new features to be issued regularly and quickly and many legacy IT systems simply aren’t geared up for this. Introducing product-aligned teams has given us greater working agility when it comes to managing and evolving journey searches and ticketing separately from payment services, for instance. This means we can make changes in distinct areas that benefit customers in days rather than weeks."
Protecting the business from IT security threats
"In today’s connected environment, it’s easier than ever for users to get IT applications running quickly and easily and circumvent best practice by using services like Dropbox to store data, for example," said David Self, Head of PMO at the multinational media company UBM.
"The only way to counteract this challenge is to educate the business about the risks and ensure any new IT initiatives and applications work well for the business.
"As data-driven enterprise, we would lose competitive advantage if we lost data. To mitigate this risk, we ensure security is a major part of any new process or developments from the start and equip all company devices with high-level security applications."
Interop London (16 – 18 June 2015, ExCeL) is the flagship event of London Technology Week. For more information, see: londontechnologyweek.co.uk/2015/01/interop-london-2/
