Enterprise Information Mobility (EIM) is my term for providing access to enterprise information, and indeed external information resources, over mobile smartphones. I’ve been tracking developments for a couple of years, and over the last six months in particular a number of market surveys have been published which suggest that this could well be a transformational technology for enterprise information management.  Although the evidence from the Global Intranet Trends report 2011 is that around 40% of the leaders in intranet implementation do have a strategy for mobile access the majority of organisations have not addressed the issue at all.

What is currently driving application development is access to business intelligence applications, where speed of decision and productivity gain are almost measureable and provide a convincing RoI for investment. There are many major IT companies with significant interests in this market sector, including Apple, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Symantec and Unisys. All the leading consulting companies, such as Aberdeen Group, Gartner and IDC are unanimous in their view that EIM will see very strong growth in 2011 and on into 2012.  Intranet managers need to take a view on strategy and tactics very quickly indeed.

I’ve now written a briefing paper on EIM, which can be downloaded as a pdf file.  In Release 1 it does no more than briefly cover the main topics, and summarise the market research surveys.  I aim to revise the paper from time to time during the year.  Suggestions for topics that should be included would be much appreciated.

In March I will be talking about EIM at the IntraTeam Conference, and at Congress Intranet in Utrecht, and running a one-day workshop in London in April.

Martin White