Mobile working, once the exclusive realm of road warriors and senior managers, is fast becoming a must-have for organisations across the board as they seek to offer an increasing variety of workers the option to work flexibly and remotely.

Nick Kirkland, managing director of senior IT users’ forum CIO Connect, says a combination of business and social factors are coming together to drive the requirement. And crucially, to attract and retain the right staff, he says organisations will increasingly need to offer the ability to work more flexibly and to use the types of mobile technologies many are already using in their personal lives.

“At the same time, companies are also seeking other business benefits, such as increased agility and the potential to reduce the amount they spend on expensive office buildings and fixed facilities,” says Kirkland. ‘Taken together, all these factors are driving mobility up the agenda for an increasing number of chief information officers (CIOs) and IT directors.”

In the past, demand was generally restricted to a limited number of mobile devices that could send and receive email or log in to the organisation’s network to synchronise data or run a specific mobile application. But as companies try to cater for an ever-increasing number of mobile and remote staff, with a diverse range of IT and communications requirements, so they will need to build mobility into the core of their IT architecture, rather than running discrete systems or tacking on ad hoc mobile solutions.

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca, says many organisations have deployed mobile email devices ­ typically BlackBerrys ­ to a select few. As they look to broaden that out to a wider community within their organisations, they will need a different approach. “Some places will try to stay on the path of one platform for all,” he says. “Others will recognise that mobile email will be of less value to certain people and they will have to adopt appropriate approaches for different groups of employees and then integrate them ­ that represents a step-change in complexity.”

One organisation that intends to stick predominantly to a single platform for the foreseeable future is Scotland’s leading law firm Macroberts. IT director Dave Murphy deployed a T-Mobile BlackBerry system four years ago. He says the platform has not required any additional in-house skills to manage or support.

“It fundamentally changed the way a number of our lawyers worked,” he says. “They’re able to deal with clients’ requests very quickly. And it quickly moved from being something that gave us an edge over competitors to being a must-have. Not providing that capability now is regarded as poor service.”

Murphy also thinks the growth of mobility in the organisation will continue to evolve organically, and he sees no need for a step-change. “The majority of businesses don’t need bells and whistles ­ they just want a simple solution that provides mobile voice and data functions as easily and cheaply as possible,” he says. “We’ve kept it pretty much tied down to the one product, we know what we’re doing with it and we’re comfortable with it."

But Lars Vestergaard, director of wireless research at analyst IDC, says that in the next three years many organisations will come to a different conclusion. He says companies’ IT set-ups need to be much more fluid and virtual than they are today ­ with the ability to deliver the right information to anyone at the right time, irrespective of where they are and what devices they are using.

“The whole architecture needs to be mobile-enabled,” he says. “The quicker companies start to realise how agile this makes them, the quicker they’ll start to take mobility into account at the foundation stage of their IT. How many are ready for that right now? Probably only a single-digit percentage figure.”