An exploration of the success factors as perceived by IT Executives and Managers in implementing mobile devices for business use

This qualitative study described the experiences of 18 IT Managers and Executives from various industries who were involved in projects that deployed mobile technology to their business users. This research study's purpose was to explore the factors for success associated with deploying mobile devices for business use. This study utilized an exploratory qualitative inquiry approach described by Bloomberg & Volpe (2012). The participants were IT Managers or Executives that had been directly involved in successful mobile technology projects at their organizations. This researcher utilized a narrative inquiry interview protocol to conduct interviews with the 18 participants. Upon analysis 11 themes were recognized. These included strategic or aligned with strategy, culture affected the project, business driven, no access to company data, reliability/performance issues, support changes, organizational/operational change, business process change, organization/IT driven, software component, and project affected the culture. In addition to the interview protocol questions asking the participants to describe their experiences with the project, they were also asked to describe how they thought the project resulted in success and to name what they believed to be the key factors for success. By analyzing the results of these two responses along with the themes that were recognized, 3 key observations emerged. The first observation was the success factors perceived by the participants did not always concur with IT project success factors found in literature. Another observation was the number of framework areas that BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) seemed to play a role. The third observation was the lack of reported process or organizational changes. These observations are discussed and recommendations for future study include examining the importance of success factors for mobile IT projects and organizational change as it relates to BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) projects in particular.