Overcoming the Challenges of Mobilizing Workforces

Overcoming the Challenges of Mobilizing Workforces

As organizations continue to mobilize their workforces, many benefits are extolled about how mobilization changes the work dynamic, enables collaboration, and improves productivity. The effort to equip workforces was accelerated by the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. However, this mobilization transformation requires organizations to overcome several hurdles. This IDC Analyst Brief discusses some of the challenges organizations face on this journey, including those that will continue to propagate because of extended work-from-home requirements and social distancing protocols that will remain in place throughout 2021. This paper also provides considerations on how organizations can more effectively leverage mobile technology to drive increased business productivity, efficiency, and collaboration for their mobile workers. IDC's 2020U.S. Enterprise Mobility Decision Maker Survey asked 340 IT decision makers about the challenges they are experiencing in deploying enterprise mobility. Topping the list is security, with 52% of respondents struggling with this issue as it relates to mobilizing their workforces. However, integration with back-end systems and applications (34.1%), low adoption by workforce (33.2%), compliance issues (32.4%), and privacy concerns (31.8%) rounded out the top 5 challenges. Three main categories have emerged around organizations' issues with mobilization efforts: people, process, and technology.