Mobile devices can shorten your home life
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Use of mobile devices is growing by leaps and bounds, and reluctant IT and information managers are going to have to adapt sooner or later to suit the plethora of new gadgets that their users are increasingly going to own. But what if those same devices add three weeks to your working year?

Over 400 million mobile communication devices were shifted in the first quarter of 2011, according to new figures from Gartner, 19% more than in the same period a year earlier. Smartphones outpaced the rest of the market, and Gartner predicts that a newly competitive mid-tier smartphone market will accelerate this trend.

Despite this, it’s tablets that offer the biggest commercial opportunities for media owners long term, according to research from Nielsen presented recently at the paidContent Mobile conference. (See paidContent coverage, or further figures from Nielsen covering American tablet usage and tablets vs eReaders.)

However the bonanza could be a little while coming; Nielsen’s figures indicate that fewer than 5% of American consumers currently use tablets, and fewer than 2% of people in Britain. Perhaps that’s just as well; last year’s FreePint survey of mobile content in the enterprise found respondents distinctly lukewarm, raising all sorts of difficulties that would have to be addressed before content on such devices could be rolled out widely among users.

Trouble is, all the signs are that users aren’t going to wait. As LiveWire’s Nancy Davis Kho commented recently: “When an employee can get at an answer faster or more efficiently on a self-bought iPad than on work-sanctioned tools, is it in the company's best interest to stop them?”

She went on to make another prescient comment: “The line between ‘work information’ and ‘personal information’ and the tools that are used to manage both grows increasingly blurred”. It certainly does – and new research commissioned by the Chartered Management Institute only serves to bear this out.

According to the CMI’s survey of 2,000 British workers – commissioned, ironically, to mark the launch of its own smartphone app – managers now spend an average of two and a half hours a week (or three weeks a year if you prefer) researching, reading or learning for work in their own time – largely enabled by mobile technology. As the CMI comments, this creates “a bit of a grey area in the work-life balance debate”.

However it goes on to note that smartphone apps are an emerging route for professional development – and since more non-managers than managers currently own smartphones, the managers may be missing a trick. Perhaps – or maybe they just like to shut off from the office at times of their own choosing.

 So … fancy working an extra three weeks a year for nothing? Thought not.

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