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''Out of the office'' contributions
by employees are increasingly important to many companies' competitive
strategies. The question for the finance department: How much are we really
spending to make it possible?
Once confined to a small group of highly mobile
professionals, mobile network access technology is becoming commonplace, even a
fixture, in contemporary business life. As the contribution of knowledge
workers and professionals becomes increasingly important to businesses — and as
competitive pressure compels companies to seek ever-greater workforce
productivity — mobile work is becoming a critical part of many companies'
competitive strategies.
Mobile workers — executives checking E-mail on PDAs,
business travelers connecting to corporate networks from the road, employees
accessing company data from their homes, and more — are increasingly common, as
prices for mobile technologies decline and companies strive to make it possible
for workers to be productive anytime, anywhere.
Industry analyst firm IDC expects the number of worldwide
mobile and remote workers to grow to 162 million by 2006, while Gartner
predicts that two-thirds of the workforce will be considered mobile by 2006. It
won't be long before a company's business performance and productivity will
depend, at least in part, on its ability to understand, manage, control, and
secure the tools and technologies that enable its mobile workers.
Chief among these tools is remote and mobile network access
— connectivity to corporate networks, applications, and data from outside the
office via devices such as laptops and PDAs. Without secure, reliable mobile
network access to corporate networks, mobile workers can't be productive.
Although maintaining, managing, and controlling mobile
network access technologies has long been the domain of IT departments, the
burgeoning importance of mobile workers and the digitally driven workplace have
made managing mobile network access more than an IT department concern.
Managing mobile workers and the technologies that enable their work is rapidly
becoming an enterprisewide concern — a business problem that cuts across
multiple functions, affecting both productivity and the bottom line;
accordingly, this problem is beginning to demand broader executive attention.
As companies rely on remote access technologies more and
more — and as mobile network access spending begins to absorb substantial
company resources — we launched this research program to examine how finance,
in particular, approaches the problem of measuring and controlling the cost of
mobile network access, and to learn whether finance's approach differs from
that of IT.
Through the research program, which consisted of surveys of
finance and IT executives as well as a series of interviews, we sought to
answer these and other questions: How are finance organizations dealing with
sustained growth in the number of mobile workers and the costs associated with
them? How deeply does the finance team understand and control the costs of
mobile network access technologies? What are companies doing to gather and
analyze spending information? How does finance's view of remote access costs
compare with IT's views of these costs? And how much are companies really
spending on mobile network access?
We learned that finance lacks the information about access
costs it wants in order to manage those costs optimally. The IT department is
the steward of this information in most companies — that is, finance relies on
IT for its information on access costs. But while IT executives say the finance
departments at their companies have adequate information about these costs,
finance executives disagree. So, as more and more companies begin to feel the
pain of mobile network access costs, it seems that collaboration between
finance and IT is the key to better information about spending — and,
accordingly, to better decision-making about the tools and technologies that
enable mobile work.
Research yielded the following key findings, which this
report will discuss in detail:
• Finance and IT agree that mobile working is on the rise
and that it drives productivity. The vast majority of finance executives
responding to our survey — nearly three-quarters — anticipate their companies
will enable more mobile workers two years from now than they do today.
Eighty-five percent of IT executives responding to our survey say their
companies will have more mobile workers in two years, confirming the results of
the survey of their finance peers (70 percent).
• Security, productivity, and regulatory compliance are
finance's top priorities when evaluating vendor offerings and crafting company
policy. Companies are willing to pay for products that address these
priorities, because offerings that fail to do so would expose the company to
liability and defeat the purpose of offering mobile network access in the first
place. Finance remains committed to cost control, to be sure, and this concern
will likely grow as mobile work continues to increase in importance. But when
evaluating vendor offerings, both finance and IT executives focus first on core
business requirements before turning their attention to costs.
• Finance and IT have sharply differing views on the
adequacy of finance's information on the cost of enabling mobile workers. As
the primary stewards of information about the cost of enabling mobile workers,
the majority (52 percent) of IT respondents say that finance has adequate
information about remote access. Finance, however, disagrees — only 18 percent
of finance respondents agreed that their departments have adequate information
about the cost of remote access.
• Companies that report the
greatest number of mobile workers are more sophisticated at managing mobile
network access spending than the population of finance respondents as a whole.
As the number of mobile workers increases and companies become more keenly
aware of the cost of remote access, finance becomes more sophisticated at
managing these costs — that is, more likely to gather information about
spending, and more likely to obtain that information from IT. |
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