AIIM Research Finds Enterprises Late to the Mobile Revolution

New Industry Watch finds 67 percent of companies acknowledge mobile is important, yet only 24 percent have a mobile-enabled process and 30 percent are still completely reliant on paper

AIIM, the global community of information professionals, released today a new industry watch research paper titled, “Process Revolution – Moving your business from paper to PCs to tablets.” The research looks at the recent impetus behind the process revolution and how mobile devices and cloud computing are accelerating the move to paper-free processes and adoption of mobile content applications.

According to the report, the “consumerisation of IT” is evident by the increasing availability of smartphones and tablets in the workplace, as well as the use of cloud technology. These imperatives are changing the way companies do business and require new ways of thinking and operating.

The AIIM research found most organisations recognise mobile devices are good for business although adoption of mobile-enabled processes is low. Sixty-seven percent of respondents considered mobile technologies important or extremely important to improving business process, contradicting the reality that only 24 percent are actually mobilising content.

“The first step in the process revolution is moving content from paper to PC,” said Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM. “The next step of moving content onto mobile devices can be challenging for businesses. It requires capturing data as close to the point of origination as possible and making it available to whoever needs it, wherever they are, in the shortest time possible.”

According to the study, 75 percent of respondents said the use of mobile devices and applications was important or extremely important to customer communication. Despite the competitive advantage of a mobile-enabled process, only five percent of organisations have extended mobile capture of documents to customers. To resolve concerns over potential security issues of mobile and cloud technologies, AIIM recommends reviewing and enforcing company policies and security mechanisms to ensure there are no barriers to business change and innovation.

The process revolution is being underwritten by technology in the hands of increasingly sophisticated information professionals. According to Gartner, Inc., worldwide smartphone sales to end users soared to 149 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 47.3 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2010.

The rise of mobile devices along with the use of the cloud can transform processes, eliminating elapsed time, lost forms, poor data and re-keying. Mobile technologies require organisations to think about processes not in paper terms but in mobile terms, and how workers are moving to a more productive and dynamic workflow. To be part of the process revolution, information professionals need to question the use of paper in any process, understand how content is produced for, and consumed on, mobile devices, and move information capture as close to the point of origination as possible.

The full report, “Process Revolution – Moving your business from paper to PCs to tablets” can be downloaded from the AIIM web site at www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/Process-Revolution-2012 [link]. The research was underwritten by ASG, Autonomy, EMC, iDatix, Kofax and OpenText.