Analysis, Mobile, Global: New studies conducted by the international research consultancy Ronin Corporation reveal that more than 70% of mobile professionals expect mobile email to “liberate” them.

Amid today’s concerns over the continuing erosion of personal time, Ronin’s research suggests that mobile email can actually deliver renewed control over the working day for the individual - with improved productivity for the employer.

In the first research of its kind, interviews were carried out with more than 300 mobile professionals across all sizes of business from the United States, United Kingdom and Italy. The research reveals a demand for mobile email among 80% of the respondents, indicating that they expect the flexibility of mobile email to achieve a balance between the demands of a personal and working life. Nearly 70% also recognised that they would be more productive through being increasingly mobile.

“These findings are remarkable,” said Rafal Gajdamowicz, Research Director with RONIN: “When ranking their answers in degrees of importance, the greatest number of respondents, over 33% in some instances, scored responses at 10 out of 10. In our experience it is virtually unprecedented for feelings to run so high in a survey of this nature.”

The worklife.freedom initiative

This study was commissioned by Visto, a company that delivers a global platform for mobile operators to provide wireless push email, as part of its worklife.freedom initiative. The initiative is, in turn, a wider effort by the company to gain a better understanding of mobile workers’ feelings about wireless email services, the features and benefits they expect from such services, and the potential obstacles organisations face when implementing mobile email systems.

“Smarter companies are waking up to the notion that mobile email must address the needs and expectations of all users, not just those of the highest executives,” said Brian Bogosian, Visto’s chairman, president and CEO. “Until now no one has asked the most important question: what does the other 97% of the professional workforce expect from mobile email? Visto is the only company that has taken the extra step to determine a mobile professional’s requirements and to put into place an organisational-wide initiative designed to address these needs.

Users' concerns

This research has identified those factors of greatest importance to the individual user. The following were all rated as important by around 80% of those interviewed:

• Ease-of-use: most important was ease-of-use and the automatic synchronisation of phone and office PC (84%);

• Personal email: an interesting finding was the very high level of importance users placed on having their personal email pushed to their phone, in addition to their work email (78%);

• Scheduled operation: a similarly high response was users’ demands for the ability to control delivery of email without having to disable their phone (82%); and

• Contacts and calendar respondents wanted to see their contact lists and calendar, in addition to email, being automatically synchronised with their PC (82%).

Visto’s worklife.freedom initiative coincides with the rollout of Mobile 5.5, its latest software release designed to address work-life requirements such as multiple independent mailboxes. For more information on Visto’s worklife.freedom initiative and more details about the mobile email report, visit www.visto.com/worklife.html.