Conceptually, employee-centered social-collaboration applications should form the foundation of any digital workplace. In practice, the maturity of tool implementations has tended to vary. And certainly employee mobile experience has emerged as a key dimension of adoption.

A constant enterprise refrain over the last few years has been the "always-on" employee, with attendant delivery strategies like "mobile-only" and "mobile-first." Given this context, we've all come to expect a vision of the "digital workplace-to-go," where all key applications are available to employees on their mobile devices.

However, RSG survey research (get your copy of the results) finds enterprises are still in the very early stages of mobile-enabling their applications.

Reality Bites

• Email is the only application that practically all organizations have mobile-enabled.
• Communication-oriented applications (Instant Messaging - 59%, Employee Directory - 54%) figure next in the list.
• Fewer than half have mobile-enabled collaboration-oriented applications such as Doc Repository (48%), and Discussion Forums  (47%).
• Overall, only one in seven organizations have mobile-enabled all the above applications.

Figure: Mobile-enablement of enterprise social-collaboration applications. Source: RSG Survey, 2016

Limited Levels of Mobile-Enablement

At first blush, these limited mobile-enablement numbers seem surprising inasmuch as...

• Almost all social-collaboration applications come with a companion mobile app and
• Vendors have been trying to sell narrow but focused mobile-collaboration add-ons (e.g., Jive Daily / Chime )

What's the Hold-Up?

Likely a combination of factors:

• Some enterprises have focused on mobile-enabling very specific job roles and workloads (e.g., document repositories for sales personnel)
• Employees with already-crowded smartphone screens won't download YAMP ("yet another mobile app")
• Security concerns in some cases are preventing a wider rollouts
• Legacy applications do not lend themselves to satisfactory mobile usage, e.g., do not yet support responsive web design

To understand better how your social-collaboration efforts, including mobile-enablement, stack up against your peers, try out RSG's complimentary benchmarking service.