Impact of enterprise mobility adoption stages on competitive advantage

The adoption of enterprise mobility leads to the development of more agile business models, increasing business performance. It is a new trend that shifts working habits, enabling employees to work out of the office using mobile devices, such as tablets, smartphones and mobile point of sales (POS), and cloud-based services to perform business tasks. Acknowledging the advantages of enterprise mobility, more and more companies aim to adopt it, in order to support communication and information sharing among employees, partners and customers through mobile devices. However, as the stages of enterprise mobility adoption differ from company to company, its impact on business performance is not always clear. Even more unclear is its impact on the acquisition and sustainability of competitive advantage.

The objective of this paper is to clarify the notion of enterprise mobility, analyse its different adoption stages and examine its impact on different business contexts. It also focuses on the relationship between varied levels of mobile business implementation and competitive advantage realization. Based on previous literature and following a resource-based view, it develops a theoretical framework aiming to clarify the relationship between varied levels of mobile business implementation and competitive advantage realization. The paper shows how the combination of different information technology (IT) resources and human resources, in an organization, may lead to different stages of enterprise mobility with various mobility capabilities. It also shows how these capabilities may increase the efficiency and effectiveness of business operations, as well as add value to an organization. It finally discusses under which circumstances these capabilities are rare and inimitable, as well as fully exploited by the organization in order to lead to sustainable competitive advantage.

Keywords: Enterprise Mobility, mobile business, organizational change, competitive advantage, VRIO framework