Creating an Enterprise Mobility Strategy
When it comes to enterprise mobility strategy, remember that you’re playing the long game. You don’t want to rush in and churn out solutions that are a poor long-term match. A good mobile strategy is a sustainable mobile strategy. And, with how quickly the mobile world develops, sustainable means adaptable.
In the past, companies scrambling to keep pace with mobile’s growth would use the “ready, aim, fire” method for mobile technology deployment. The idea was to deploy first, think later. That approach will stifle your ROI and leave you perpetually playing catch-up.
A smart, sustainable mobile strategy will help you transform and grow your business.
Instead of deploying technologies without a clue how they fit into your organizational mission. To help you get started, we’ve summarized the key steps involved in developing a winning mobile strategy.
Evaluate what you have and what you want
Before you invest any money in mobile, you need to understand where your organization is at the moment, including your requirements, business goals, and applications architecture. Take a look at your processes and existing infrastructure and think about how you might leverage them in the mobile world. When you have clear goals in mind, ask yourself what applications and devices will help you reach them?
Assemble a cross-functional team to reconcile IT considerations with corporate requirements
If you’ll remember our stats from earlier, a mobile strategy created in a vacuum or functional silo isdoomed to fail. A sound strategy requires input from all major stakeholders.
Have your enterprise mobility solutions provider assess your business goals for scalability, adaptability, and manageability. Identify additional opportunities by having different teams discuss how your workforce and customers use mobility to interface with your company.
Set a timeline and a budget
Before the development phase, have a rough budget ironed out as well as a detailed deployment timeline. One of the many benefits of using TkXel is that we walk you through these initial steps of the strategizing process in our discovery workshop. The workshop ensures that you and your development partner are on the same page. We’ll discuss the workshop process in more detail when we discuss deployment in Chapter Four.
Think about devices
When you’re deciding what devices to include in your mobile strategy, you essentially have two choices: BYOD (bring your own device) or a standard-issue device. With BYOD, you won’t have to provide the device or issue new company-wide devices every time your standard-issue technology becomes obsolete. On the other hand, BYOD presents unique security and standardization issues. With a standard-issue device, however, you simplify installation and support by dealing with only one platform.
Enabling your employees to work and communicate wherever they are is a blessing to your organization.
Don’t overlook security
Enabling your employees to work and communicate wherever they are is a blessing to your organization, but it also exposes you to security threats you’ve never had to worry about before. You now have sensitive corporate information following employees everywhere, such as the gym, on airplanes, and at restaurants. For this reason, any sustainable mobile strategy requires an end-to-end security strategy — think of them like peanut butter and jelly.
Fortunately, modern mobile devices and apps have more advanced security features than ever before. Multi-factor authentication, remote wipe, and document restrictions are just a few strategies you might consider.
Plan to support the cause
Just like cars need regular maintenance, mobile strategies need adequate tech support. Sustaining a mobile infrastructure, especially if you go the BYOD route, can quickly overwhelm your IT department. Few organizations have the tech skills and manpower requisite to deal with enterprise-wide issues on multiple devices and platforms.
This is why so many companies decide to outsource enterprise mobile management to a dedicated company. So instead of incurring the usually exorbitant