Majority of Employees Ditch Corporate Mobile Apps

By Daniel Santa Cruz

Fifty-eight percent of employees at mid-to-large businesses ditch corporate mobile apps they should be using for work-related tasks. Meanwhile, 64 percent of employees freely download apps of their choosing from public app stores to use at work, putting corporate security at risk.

That’s according to a new study by Mobiquity, “Employee Mobile App Satisfaction Report.”

The study focuses on the key challenge that enterprises face: Business-to-employee (B2E) applications more often than not lack the design and user experience that is typically found in customer and consumer-facing apps. The study found that 43 percent of smartphone users and 41 percent of tablet users are not impressed with the corporate mobile apps they are expected to use. Just 26 percent of smartphone and 20 percent of tablet users claim to “stick with” their corporate mobile apps.

“It is clear that employee satisfaction with corporate mobile apps is falling short,” said Scott Snyder, chief strategy officer at Mobiquity. “To ensure greater app engagement and reduce the privacy and security risks associated with rogue app usage enterprises must adopt the same best practices as they do for customer-facing apps. Identifying use-cases and user personas is key to designing rich, mobile app experiences that keep employees engaged and productive.”

The study also found that nearly 70 percent of employees currently use their own personal mobile devices in the workplace, a trend that is only going to continue, according to Gartner. The Mobiquity study found that IT departments are trying to implement their own tactics to limit employees downloading and using apps of their pleasing at work. Nine percent have an enterprise app store and mandate which apps must be used on mobile devices. Thirteen percent restrict which apps can be used on personal tablets and smartphones in the workplace. Twenty percent pre-load apps onto employees’ mobile devices. Twenty-five percent block all or some personal apps on company-owned smartphones.

“Once CIOs allow employees to bring their own devices, they open the door to this outflow of unprotected company data and there is no way to enforce or secure it,” said Ty Rollin, chief technology officer at Mobiquity. “But implementing a BYOD policy can actually help employees become part of the solution, making them the ‘security guards’ of corporate data.”