Mobile data spend a headless chicken

UK BASED mobile operator, O2, has discovered that an astonishing 63 per cent of businesses have no clear plans as to where they're going with mobile data.

This is despite the fact that around £9.9 billion will be spent by organisations on mobile out of a total budget of £83.3 billion. O2 commissioned the survey from Network Research and interviewed around 600 IT directors from a wide cross section of firms and organisations.

One conclusion is that seven per cent of the total workforce are using PDAs without the knowledge of their IT departments.

Plus 18 per cent of IT directors haven't a clue as to what their staff were up to in terms of synchronising emails with their PDAs, for example.

Only 10 per cent of businesses appreciated that spending in the mobile arena can be justified by increased employee availability or improving customer communications.

The survey confirms that PDAs and smartphones are turning up willy-nilly in business organisations and that 35 per cent of the time the IT department isn't overseeing spending in this sector. µ