Introduction/Executive Summary
The “anywhere office” is a reality in corporate America today – whether senior executives
realize it or not. Indeed, it’s now safe to say that office-bound knowledge workers are,
by and large, a vanishing breed.
This report focuses on the critical role being played by IT professionals who are now
on the front lines in this corporate revolution. After all, it’s the explosion in IT capabilities
and portability that has enabled the emergence of the anywhere office.
With Citrix Online’s active guidance and support, we conducted an online survey2 to
learn how IT is supporting flexible work, what challenges that support creates for IT
organizations and what kinds of policies and practices are in place to enable IT to meet
their employers’ business needs. Over 400 IT executives and professional responded
to a series of questions about how their organizations supported mobile work and what
challenges mobile work presents to IT organizations.
We found, quite simply, that mobile work is the norm today; only 6% of the survey respondents work in organizations that
prohibit mobile work. This new reality presents IT organizations with a number of technical challenges – in particular, the need
to maintain corporate data and network security standards in a far more flexible and dispersed environment. However, it’s clear
that IT organizations are more than up to the task; only about 4% of the survey respondents reported that any individual IT
difficulties were preventing remote employees from working effectively.
One of the more surprising findings (for us, at least) was that having access to an office PC and/or company server (55%) was
almost identically as important to remote workers as having a cell phone (56%). In contrast, it was no surprise that laptops
are the most important technology for remote workers (90%). Only 29% of the respondents believed that Web conferencing
software was important for occasionally mobile...