How Social Adoption impacts Hong Kong businesses

Hong Kong currently boasts an impressive 16.4 million mobile subscriptions, with 71% social media penetration and a cumulative average online presence exceeding 5.5 hours per person, each day, according to latest insights from We Are Social.

With a population of just over 7 million, the avalanche of social technologies infiltrating Hong Kong businesses is now becoming impossible to ignore.

It is evident that companies in Hong Kong recognise the value technology brings to increasing productivity, better collaboration between colleagues and departments, greater brand experience between customers and companies.

However, businesses are also experiencing a big shift in the Hong Kong market. In particular, this is focused on the demand generated from Generation Y and Z for a more socialised work environment. Recent Gartner research has revealed a greater demand for flexibility at work is driving a shift towards fewer desks and more devices.

In addition, the Hong Kong government also anticipates advancements in IT will increase in the number of “Soho” (small office home office) workers as more begin to tailor work schedules to meet personal and family commitments.

The new breed of socialised workers emerges as the largest age group since the baby boomer generation: they are well-educated, well-travelled, tech-savvy, able to multi-task, and reaching out for social interaction. With Millenials urging even the most traditional companies to deploy a more collaborative and socialised environment.

Subsequently, a survey issued by Fortinet revealed 15 percent of young local employees believe they have no obligation to understand the security risks posed to their companies by using their own devices at work.

Further to this, user expectations of a clean and simple mobile user experience often outweigh security concerns, according to Gartner. These statistics reveal that businesses in Hong Kong are now facing a considerable challenge.

Catering to this new breed of employees, managers need to fully understand the user behaviour whilst introducing refreshed guidelines to ensure a secure social environment at work. To the customers, companies need to understand the user behaviour to generate business and brand loyalty in a secured environment.

Companies are eager to protect themselves against cyber-attacks, be it for reputation, revenue, and accountability reasons. It is a step in the right direction, as by not taking security risks into consideration, companies become an easy target for cyber attackers, which can probably jeopardise an organisation’s reputation.

Security is one of the top hurdles for Hong Kong businesses adopting new technologies. Formerly, they have been able to keep data behind their walls and have control over it.

But with newer technologies, customer data is more exposed. The number of security breaches is on the rise and systems now require more advanced technology to keep them secure.

Gartner predicts that, by 2016, 30% of organisations will use biometric authentication on mobile devices, up from 5% today. With the biometric authentication approach, businesses will be able to implement a system that can conduct fingerprint, voice, and eye recognition procedures to prevent instances of sophisticated cyber attacks.

Nonetheless, the pace of technology evolution will only accelerate – such as with the ‘social’ demands of these younger cohorts. Millennials will soon dominate the Hong Kong workforce – just the same way Baby Boomers did once.

This tech-savvy and highly mobile generation grew up with the Internet and expects readily available information for work and for pleasure on their mobile devices, as they already have on a typical desktop computer. And soon these younger cohorts are going to be the biggest customer group, conducting their lives in the virtual space.

Together, the technology and the customer demand of this newest group drive a transformation of how different sectors act. Looking at the banking sector, Millennials’ expectations are to have access to the services, transact, anytime and anyhow.

Mobility strategy is not an easy endeavour for any company. Areas of consideration include access to applications and data, balance of security policies and user convenience, speed to provide needed information or complete a transaction, ease of browsing, etc.

For most businesses it is a time- and resource-absorbing task to manifest mobile applications and to maintain these. What businesses need is a backend infrastructure that can help deliver image-heavy content, prioritise traffic to overcome mobile network latency, offer visibility into application performance, all these while keeping web vulnerabilities low.

Furthermore, as cyber crime becomes more complex across Hong Kong’s digital landscape, with attacks from multiple angles on different devices, single-purpose security machines will be phased out in favour of sophisticated multi-purpose machines.

This convergence will also happen in the context of performance, as businesses come to expect fast, reliable user experience on any device.