Essential Elements to An Effective Enterprise Mobility Strategy

Mobile device shipments are growing in leaps and bounds. While more and more workers amalgamate both personal as well as corporate computing devices in order achieve their daily goals, this presents a daunting challenge for enterprises. Starting from cost effectively deploying, managing, and supporting all the diverse devices to ensuring an optimal user experience, enterprises are scrambling to update their policies and legacy systems in order to embrace mobility.

The Importance of Enabling a Mobile Workforce

Data Anywhere

With an assortment of smartphones, laptops, tablets and PCs within arm’s reach at all points of the day, real time access to information is a natural part of our lifestyles. Instead of switching ON at work and switching OFF after 6pm, employees are empowered to carry out business functions and take important decisions outside of a regular workday. The natural upside: customers stand to benefit.

Real time Collaboration

This is a no-brainer. Mobile helps employees stay connected to their teams with several smart apps that bring the whiteboard right into the palm.

Easy Workflows

Technology comes with the power to ease repeatable tasks and smartphones make tasks such as scanning and signing documents all the more simple.

Productivity Gains

So where does this all lead to? Yes, gains in productivity through operational efficiency. This is critical to employers; it essentially frees up workers to focus on the larger and more important issues and keeping customers happy.

What Goes Into an Enterprise Mobility Strategy?

A mobility strategy is an absolute essential for any enterprise to put up a balancing act between multiple devices, ownership models, applications and operating systems, satisfying end user and corporate needs all the while egging the business higher up the growth ladder.

Understand Your Business

The primary intent behind an enterprise mobile strategy should pivot around understanding your business needs and gaining a clear vision of your goals and objectives. A business case that concretely justifies investment in the enterprise mobility strategy is important.

Develop Innovative Use Cases with End Users in Mind

What scenario would make it easy for your employees to get the job done and what would make it absolutely practical for customers to do business with you? How do each of these groups of people use their mobile devices so that their user experience can be optimized? Answering these questions will help identify complicated process and work flows and weeding them to ensure a sustainable and profitable mobile strategy.

Security vis-à-vis Business Freedom

IT departments view BYOD as a departure from the traditional models of corporate information security and control, but also concur that it is a productive, cost saving opportunity. A standard mobile device management (MDM) solution comes handy, offering IT some level of control, but often MDM is not a cure-all that can solve all the challenges associated with data security. Mobile applications management (MAM), together with cordoning off space for secured apps in the device or a “secure cloud” must work together as part of the mobility strategy.

Multi-Platform Compatibility

Going beyond multi-device support, a common runtime environment is also needed for integration, services, and policy implementation. Thus, incremental investments in additional applications, updates to current applications can be set in motion quite easily.

The Cloud

No mobility strategy is complete without talking about the cloud which empowers users to access content from one device to another, as well as enable all of these devices to be used as controllers for other gadgets and services. Managing the enterprise mobile infrastructure is impossible without data storage and controls.

The future is being able to leverage mobile technologies to tie-in multiple, varied and unlikely sources of data to facilitate ‘Connected Enterprise’.  The first steps to that goal swivel around the modeling of a mobility strategy that bears in mind future plans for application development, deployment, management and security.