Are you confident that you and your customers are where they should be when it comes to cloud and mobile?

That confidence might be misplaced, given some rather startling information about what enterprises are doing with mobile content that’s just emerged from a large AIIM study we’ve conducted.

What we’ve found: a mere 10% of enterprises have an internal BYOD programme they’re happy with – while 40% told us team members have no mobile access to important on-premise content.

The reality out there, it appears, is that firms are also struggling when it comes to mobile ECM (enterprise content management) deployment, with more than three quarters of those we talked to admitting they need to embrace mobile applications or be left behind.

However, there are some bright spots. Cloud seems to be an area of some real progress, for example; with 75% of respondents saying they are likely to be using some form of cloud ECM within the next four years. One in four, 26%, say they already are.

There’s also some good news in terms of the context for cloud success; three-quarters of respondents think the security offered by their cloud provider is likely to be better or equal to their own, while effective collaboration and more modern and flexible applications are also seen as prizes that cloud can deliver. Even better, a third of cloud ECM users had noticed a cost reduction compared to on-premise.

But that’s absolutely no cause for complacency on the bigger issue of mobile. Mobile is one of the biggest disruptive forces we’ve ever seen, and there is simply no debate – enterprises have to catch up and put mobile at the core of their content strategies. That’s because mobile has fundamentally changed the way people work and collaborate, and team members need to access enterprise content on the road. We should worry, for example, that only 17% of respondents have a mobile information governance policy relevant to their business – and just 5% employ anything like a Chief Mobile Officer (CMOO), as in someone to ‘own’ all of this.

The good news is that for organisations that take up the challenge of mobile ECM, 76% are seeing ROI as soon as within 18 months.

The verdict’s clear: now is the time for organisations to truly embrace cloud and mobile ECM. We have more content than ever – with volumes growing daily in many enterprises. That means finding ways to manage that content, get the most value from it and empower workers to work more effectively just makes sense.

ECM is changing and we all need to be able to change with it too – suppliers and users alike.

By John Mancini, President of Market Intelligence firm, AIIM  (http://www.aiim.org/)

To find out more about the issues raised here, please download the AIIM study, Mobile and Cloud: accessing, capturing and processing content, here. The survey was taken using a web-based tool by 282 individual members of the AIIM community between 05 June 2015, and 02 July, 2015.