Mobile Enterprise Email: Isn’t It Time You Really Made It Work?

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Your organization has embraced the use of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) to help achieve its strategic goals for digital transformation, collaboration, user productivity, operational efficiency, and remote work—so isn’t it also time that your mobile enterprise email fully supports the actual work that your users are trying to get done?

Mobile Enterprise Email as the Means to an End: Helping Your Enterprise Users to Get Their Work Done on Mobile Devices

If your organization is like most others, you have ambitious goals for strategic initiatives such as digital transformation, collaboration, user productivity, operational efficiency—as well as a heightened emphasis on remote work, in response to the pandemic of 2020.

It goes without saying that these important initiatives are enabled by modern information technologies, but it should be just as obvious that the technologies themselves are really just the tactical means to achieve your strategic ends. The organization’s ultimate goals are the tangible business benefits that successful implementations of these initiatives can make possible, for example:

• • Make it easier for users throughout the extended enterprise to create, organize, find, share, communicate, and transact with one other, using familiar and convenient productivity tools.
  • Improve traditional business processes in terms of higher scale, lower cost, faster workflows / shorter cycle times, enhanced functionality, and better user experiences.

For most organizations, mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets) —which enterprise users have already adopted on a massive scale over the last decade, for their personal use —have also become a primary means of supporting these strategic initiatives in the enterprise. In addition, our personal use of mobile devices has irrevocably changed our collective expectations about their day-to-day use in the enterprise, in terms of:

• • Access to enterprise resources at any time, from any location, over any network
  • User experience, i.e., convenience and ease of use
  • Privacy and security of mobile data, both personal and professional

This brings us to mobile enterprise email. Virtually all organizations in Aberdeen’s research identify enterprise email as a business-critical application —and not just for messaging, but also for calendar/ scheduling, contacts, presence, and access / editing / secure sharing of digital documents. Do all of these key capabilities also extend to your mobile enterprise email environment?

For example, a recent Aberdeen study confirmed that documents—whether paper-based or fully digital —are an integral component of core business processes and workflows, for virtually all organizations. More than 9 out of 10(91%) respondents currently use digital documents (i.e., files) in some manner, while only about 1 in 4 (28%) reported having at least some core business processes and workflows involving no documents at all (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Digital Documents are an Integral Part of Core Business Processes and Workflows, for Virtually All Organizations
Source: Aberdeen, July 2020

In other words, mobile enterprise email is increasingly essential for the execution of business-critical process and workflows —but it’s only valuable to that extent that it actually helps your users to get their work done on their mobile devices. “Document-friendly” is one key example.

Consumer-Oriented Email Apps on Mobile Devices: Not Designed for Doing Enterprise Work

With only a moment’s reflection, it’s easy to appreciate that when it comes to getting the work done on mobile devices, there are substantial differences between mobile email applications for personal use and mobile email applications for enterprise use. For example:

• Personal email on mobile devices is predominately about one-to-one messaging, in which users generally receive and triage each of their incoming emails—i.e., we get high volumes of email, and tend to make quick decisions to delete, read, respond, or retain for later action or reference. For personal use, we expect mobile email applications to make it fast and simple to accomplish these basic and highly repetitive tasks, regardless of whether we are responding in real-time or in batches.
• Enterprise email on mobile devices requires the same kind of message processing functionality as personal email, and also much more. As noted previously, enterprise email over time has come to provide a common platform for a number of key capabilities, including:

1. 1. Both one-to-one and group-based messaging
   2. Managing calendars and scheduling meetings
   3. Managing and interacting with both internal and external contacts
   4. Accessing, editing, and securely sharing enterprise documents, as an integral part of core business processes and workflows
   5. Protecting the privacy and security of enterprise data, to manage risk and address regulatory compliance

In a traditional office environment—in which enterprise users rely on fully-functional desktop or web-based versions of enterprise email—it’s easy to take the typical use cases and functionality for enterprise email for granted. In an increasingly mobile environment, however, popular consumer-oriented email applications can fall frustratingly short in some or all of these essential areas. That is, consumer-oriented email apps on mobile devices are generally lightweight at getting the job done(productivity), and in terms of privacy and security (risk, compliance). Consumer-oriented email apps on mobile devices are generally lightweight at getting the job done(productivity), and in terms of privacy and security (risk, compliance).

Aberdeen’s analysis of hundreds of online reviews for Microsoft Outlook on mobile devices provides some illustrative examples of these kinds of shortcomings, and helps to paint a vivid picture of the differences between mobile email applications for personal use and enterprise use:

• • “It’s only good for basic reading and writing of simple emails. I can’t easily manage my email or create and manage a hierarchy of folders.”
  • “Checking email shouldn’t have this many complications, and being able to find and delete emails by search should be an option. It’s egregiously inconvenient.”
  • “It makes you less productive; the workflow logic has made it an utter pain to use on a daily basis. I lose hours of time each month because of its poor design.”
  • “Lacks fluidity and user interface that prevents users from easily executing simple, everyday tasks. [Selecting and deleting emails] requires an inordinate amount of time and steps for a simple function.”
  • “It takes less time for me to boot up the PC and check my calendars than it does for me to use the mobile app and understand what kind of meetings I have for the day.”
  • “A fantastic app for email management, but its lack of comprehensive messaging formatting and its unreliable loading of attachments renders it suitable only for casual business correspondence.”
  • “The only reason I use this is because my employer forces me to. From the illogical (like being unable to fully see the email received, while responding to it) to the impossible (like being able to switch easily between different email folders) … it is virtually unusable for business users.”
  • “Generally it’s okay, but I find some things less usable because of extra and unnecessary clicks. For example: longer emails that display a ‘Read More’ button, and returning to the message list after deleting a message rather than an option to read the next message in the list.”
  • “I can view my emails just as easily in a mobile web browser, and the group calendars work better on the web than on the iOS version. It’s incredibly frustrating that I have to go to this level of manipulation with the web version, just to perform basic tasks.”
  • “Emails are properly synced between iPhone, PC desktop, and web. For the calendar functionality, the only robust solution for a proper sync is to use the desktop to record the appointment. Entering meetings from the iPhone is hit or miss. Inconvenient, but at least I don’t miss anything.”
  • “For better security, we were told to stop using the native iPhone email app and use only the Microsoft Outlook app. That change comes with the steep price of losing basic features.”
  • “The inconvenience outweighs the benefits.”

Framing the Value of an Investment in Mobile Enterprise Email—in Business Terms—is the Key to Making a Change

In Aberdeen’s research, organizations are pretty clear about what they are looking for from their investments in modern technology-based capabilities to improve their core business processes and workflows: cost savings, productivity, convenience, speed, and efficiency—while still addressing security and compliance (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Leading Drivers for Investments in Technology-Based Capabilities to Improve Core Business Processes and Workflows

For organizations currently using consumer-oriented email apps on mobile devices for core business processes and workflows, framing the value of an investment in mobile enterprise email —in business terms, not technical details—is the key to making a change. To this end, Aberdeen has provided a structured breakdown of key factors of business impact related to cost savings (e.g., lost productivity) and cost avoidance (e.g., human error, risk, compliance), along with illustrative quantitative measures, to support a “before” vs. “after” comparison.

Table 1: Framing the Business Value of Mobile Enterprise Email, as Compared to Consumer-Oriented Email Apps on Mobile Devices
Source: Aberdeen, July 2020

Selecting a Mobile Enterprise Email Solution

In Aberdeen’s view, IT and security professionals should guide conversations within their own organizations about an investment in mobile enterprise email by using a structure along the lines of Table 1:

• • These conversations can be qualitative at first, using the factors and measures of Table 1 to shine a light on the problems with the current state and the opportunities for improvement.
  • These factors and measures can also support a straightforward quantitative analysis of the business value of mobile enterprise email, to help make a better-informed business decision about making an incremental investment—a task which technical professionals often find difficult. (Look for a follow-on research report from Aberdeen on quantifying the business value of mobile enterprise email.)

In addition to establishing solution selection criteria for mobile enterprise email related to productivity and ease-of-use (e.g., document-friendly; consistent user experience across mobile, desktop, and web; reduced time to complete the full range of key enterprise email tasks on a mobile device), here are three key security-related capabilities that in Aberdeen’s view should also be considered:

• • Mobile Threat Defense (MTD)—to provide all mobile devices (regardless of ownership) that are authorized to access enterprise resources with protection, detection, and remediation from the large and growing landscape of mobile threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits. MTD which is natively integrated with mobile enterprise email helps to ensure that all devices have it installed and active.
  • Adaptive Policies and Controls—to replace traditional one size fits all policies in favor of dynamic policies, based on an intelligent, real-time assessment of multiple risk factors.
  • Conditional Access—to enable the upside opportunities of higher user productivity, convenience, and ease of use by streamlining and fast-tracking access for typical, low-risk activities, and to help protect against the downside of unknown / abnormal, higher-risk scenarios. These three key security-related capabilities for mobile enterprise email are also represented visually in Figure 3, below.

Figure 3: Three Key Security-Related Capabilities—Mobile Threat Defense, Adaptive Policies and Controls, and Conditional Access
Source: “Zero Trust” for Enterprise Mobility: The Brakes That Help Your Users Go Faster; Aberdeen, November 2019

Summary and Key Takeaways

Mobile enterprise email is the technical means to a strategic end: helping your enterprise users to get their work done on mobile devices. Enterprise email is a business-critical application, not only for messaging but also for calendar / scheduling, contacts, presence, and access/editing / secure sharing of digital documents—key capabilities which must also extend to your mobile enterprise email environment.

Consumer-oriented email apps on mobile devices are not designed for doing enterprise work, falling frustratingly short in some or all of these essential areas. Consumer-oriented email apps on mobile devices are generally lightweight at getting the job done(productivity), and in terms of privacy and security (risk, compliance).

Framing the value of an investment in mobile enterprise email—in business terms—is the key to making a change. A structured breakdown of key factors of business impact related to cost savings (e.g., lost productivity) and cost avoidance (e.g., human error, risk, compliance), along with illustrative quantitative measures, supports a classic “before” vs. “after” comparison.

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Aberdeen Strategy & ResearchOpens a new window , a division of Spiceworks Ziff DavisOpens a new window , with over three decades of experience in independent, credible market research, helps illuminate market realities and inform business strategies. Our fact-based, unbiased, and outcome-centric research approach provides insights on technology, customer management, and business operations, to inspire critical thinking and ignite data-driven business actions.