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Not only are more people using mobile technology, but also, they are using it for a greater range of use cases. Needless to say, mobile ownership and use are highest among consumers, who spend an average 26 hours online per week and are the heaviest consumers of digital media. Mobile use is also high among the pool of applicants you will recruit to work at your company. Increasingly, all of these people will look to interact with your brand via easy-to-use mobile apps instead of traditional channels.
In order to create a comprehensive enterprise mobility strategy, we recommend the following 10-step approach:
As with any technology implementation program, it is important to start out with an understanding of what you could and should get from the strategy. Embracing mobility will likely result in a number of benefits, and will allow your organization to seize specific market or transformation opportunities. Typical business goals include delivering more agile and responsive customer service, enabling or supporting a move to cloud computing, or implementing a flexible working regime to reduce operational costs.
Defining your business goals will help you gain a view of the technological requirements of the strategy. You will typically have an existing infrastructure in place and will want to know how much of it could or should be used to support mobility. You will also need to consider factors, such as how you implement security, decide on access policies, guarantee connectivity, maintain consistent usability standards, safeguard mission-critical traffic and so on.
Your technology requirements will give you an insight into the timeline for implementation of your strategy. The schedule for bringing new infrastructure on board, for example, might depend on existing contract periods or the need to carry out tenders. Your implementation timeline should be realistic yet short.
Having an understanding of technology requirements will also allow you to build an initial budget and identify potential funding challenges or shortfalls. Part of the budgeting process will include the development of a business plan to show how you will achieve a return on investment. Wherever possible, this should include quantitative metrics.
The security risks of enterprise mobility strategies are now much better understood, and easily mitigated. Nevertheless, it is clear that any strategy which opens your organization up to the outside world will need to include protective measures. When reviewing policy requirements, consider which ones can be implemented automatically through technology and which will depend on employees.
A detailed review of your policy requirements may have an impact on your technical specifications, for example by highlighting the need for tighter endpoint security or alternative third-party connectivity providers. This information should enable you to build a final budget that can be checked against your original business plan.
Once you have a detailed view of your technology requirements, budget, and timelines, then you are able to start the process of selecting appropriate vendors. Vendor selection will naturally depend on the scope of the project and, for example, whether or not the mobility strategy is linked to other IT initiatives such as cloud computing, back-end app creation and integration. This process partner should be able to encompass the entire mobility ecosystem, from specs to deployment.
Notwithstanding the need to move quickly with the adoption of a mobility strategy, it pays to carry out a proof of concept or a similar test deployment ahead of a full rollout. Trying out mobility first with a prototype, a given department or location, for instance, will enable you to check that the costs and benefits are within the ranges you expect and at the same time allow you to compare the results with the rest of your organization.
The learning from the proof of concept should help inform your wider rollout plans. Given most users’ familiarity with mobile devices today, it is unlikely the rollout will require significant device training. However, you may need to provide guidance on policies and processes. If you are rolling out enterprise mobility services in phases (which is considered a best practice) then it may be worth considering which functions or business units are most likely to benefit from the transition the most, and prioritizing accordingly. Typically, a mobility strategy may offer an immediate and significant return on investment in a sales setting, for example.
As with every aspect of technology, the mobile arena is developing at breakneck speed. This means you will have to update your mobility strategy on an ongoing basis to take advantage of new opportunities.
It is clear that the current trend towards increased mobility is only going to continue. With this in mind, it is important to see your mobility strategy not just as a way of bringing your organization up to date, but also as an opportunity for true business transformation. Think of likely mobility scenarios five or 10 years from now: will fixed endpoints still exist? Will there still be a need for office-based workers? Will your organization still have features such as a centralized switchboard or reception staff?
Embracing mobility today means you can lay the groundwork for the future and create a future-proof business, plugging into new modes of innovation and capturing new sources of value. As an example, here are three near-future sources of market disruption your business might soon encounter:
● The Age of Apps: Mobile apps are already a familiar feature of work and life, but many still represent adaptations of existing applications to a handheld platform. Increasingly though, enterprise apps are going mobile first, allowing for improved efficiency and usability.
● The Internet of Things: Mobile technology plays a massive role connecting inanimate objects to corporate networks. This is a trend that McKinsey believes has a potential economic impact of up to $11.1 trillion by 2025.
As mobile device usage becomes the norm for network connectivity across the global workforce, it is no longer enough for organizations to consider mobility as an afterthought. Instead, there is growing urgency to put mobility at the heart of IT strategies and build an environment for mobile workers from the ground up.
