Has your organization fully prepared to take advantage of enterprise mobility solutions and associated cloud service offerings? If not, then perhaps you lack the leadership of a savvy CIO -- that is, a Chief Innovation Officer that can enable your business for prosperity in the Global Networked Economy.

In the current operating environment, organizations need to improve the efficiency of business processes and provide better services and innovative products to customers through both established and emerging channels to ensure competitive advantage in the global marketplace, according to the latest market study by Ovum.

Their research revealed that IT is under pressure to combine existing resources and infrastructure with emerging technologies to deliver the desired functionality in the most cost-effective and time-efficient manner.

Communications enablement can reduce the latency associated with human involvement in business processes and provide many benefits such as more efficient resource utilization, faster time-to-value, and more effective collaboration -- both within and between enterprises.

"The rapid proliferation of mobility solutions is creating complex integration issues that need new solutions. Lightweight mobile middleware is gaining ground as a suitable approach for integration of mobility solutions with enterprise IT systems and business process,” explains Saurabh Sharma, senior analyst at Ovum.

Why You Need a Strategic Roadmap for ICT

Ovum believes that mobility will drive demand for communications-enabled business process (CEBP) development -- to enable person-to-person interactions, as well as application/business process-to-person and person-to-application/business process interactions.

Many CEBP development platforms are highly proprietary and do not provide all the necessary tools and interfaces to ease the complexity of communications and business process integration.

Customization work done by system integrators (SIs) to enable the integration of communications services with specific business processes adds to the total cost of ownership (TCO) of unified communications and collaboration (UCC) solutions and, for this reason, is not a sustainable approach in the long run.

Sharma adds "CEBP development should not be approached as a one-off project. Instead, organizations should develop a strategy and roadmap, and prioritize business processes for communications enablement based on their business value."

Organizations should focus on leveraging existing integration architecture for the development of CEBPs and to enable integration between disparate applications; service-oriented architecture (SOA) and event-driven architecture (EDA) are architectural prerequisites for CEBPs.

That being said, do you have the best talent for the task at hand?

Are you ready for cloud computing? Before opening your wallet, take a good hard look at what your information and communication technology (ICT) infrastructure is really like. After a decade in the doldrums, corporate IT spending is showing signs of waking up: companies worldwide are investing in mobility, cloud-based services and collaboration tools.

The following video interview describes the related findings from new research by INSEAD. They suggest that business leaders should heed their warning, Don’t Waste Your ICT Investments.