Enterprise Mobility – Insight Trends, Strategies & Solutions

What is Enterprise Mobility?

Enterprise mobility is an emergent hot topic; which is an amalgam of people (employees and customers), processes and technology intended on extended productivity of the organization by increasing array of Mobile Apps, devices, allied services, and network to encourage employees using mobile devices and cloud services to perform business tasks.

For the past few years enterprises have taken a “ready, fire, aim” approach to deploying mobile-first strategy. Enterprise mobility is the emergent trend of the current era which is not a matter of luxury, rather a roadmap of securing success in the digital landscape. Successful businesses are witness of the potential of enterprise mobility which caused a positive impact on in terms of amplified productivity, superior communication, and better efficiency.

Factors to Determine Whether you are ready for Enterprise Mobility:

The Architecture of your business:

Here you need to check where mobility fit into IT? Do you have competent skills to plan support and operate mobility technologies? What is your strategy to prioritize mobile projects for acquiring talent and funding etc?

Keeping Pace with Technology Evolution:

Have you any mechanism to track and manage rapid paced technologies

Mobile Applications:

What course of a plan of action to prioritize mobile app development which is efficient to bring the uppermost business impact? Required tools, technologies, workforce and processes to deliver mobile apps?

Security:

What are different scrutiny methods, technology, processes, training, and necessary infrastructure you are going to adapt to control access to mobile workforce and data?

Here are some of the many objectives that the businesses want to achieve with enterprise mobility:

• Operational swiftness to gain a competitive advantage and enhance productivity.
• Data driven, quick business decisions on the basis of reliable & efficient data.
• More alliance with remote employees, enabling them to contribute to decision making.
• Swift and seamless events and KPIs report to a wider audience to enable them situational awareness and issue resolution.
• Artificial intelligence, real-time data collection and reporting for improved workforce productivity.
• Control over expenses and waste due to inefficient resource allocation
• Improved visibility to remote operations and projects.
• Higher profits due to efficient productivity.

Scope of Enterprise Mobility:

From Enterprise and Employees Perspective:

Trends: The latest forecast from IDC has revealed that in the next five years the U.S. mobile employee population will increase from 96.2 million in 2015 to 105.4 million by 2020. By the end of 2020, mobile employees will account for nearly three quarters (72.3%) of the total U.S. workforce

Another report in association with Nasscom and Deloitte suggests that the global enterprise mobility market opportunity is expected to grow $140 billion by 2020. This market comprises of MDM, Mobile Application Management (MAM), mobile security and Mobile Business applications. Enterprise mobility growth is expected to be the highest at 21%.

An Enterprise Mobility Management solution (EMM) enables businesses to manage the mobile devices used by their workforce. The EMM comprises of Unified endpoint management (UEM), Mobile Device Management (MDM), Mobile Content Management, Security and Mobile Application Management (MAM).

EMM solutions can be embedded as cloud-based services, hybrid solutions or on-premises software.

From Customer and Associated Vendors/Partners Perspective:

In Global State of Enterprise Mobility Report 2014 -15, the biggest advantages of mobility in business is customer loyalty and retention, cited by 28.6% of respondents, followed closely by improved sales results with customers, which was cited by 23.2% of respondents.

The evolution of the digital era has changed the buying cycle of a consumer. This trend is not limited to, customers rather are escalated for business partners, other stakeholders, vendors to interact more precisely with enterprises. Web-based models are not effective to produce substantiation productivity and growth for businesses, so there is a requirement of a channel through which they can transcend conventional methods of engagement with their customers and clients.

Mobility empowers businesses with endless opportunities to not only reach their customers but also provide a comprehensive insight to understand their behavior and bottleneck.

For the substantial growth, it is vital that businesses should communicate regularly with existing customers, they explore new dimensions of the market, take initiatives for brand building. These all can be can be achieved by taking leverage of deploying Apps.

Here are three trends related to customer-oriented Enterprise Mobility:

Data and Insight

The insightful data and analytics are one of the biggest takeaways that an enterprise can take leverage from customer-facing mobile apps and services through enterprise mobility. This data can be used to analyze the behavioral pattern and devise a strategy for improvements in marketing offerings.

Once we have enough data in order to understand customer behavior, it is easy to devise campaigns for personalized customers’ interactions, delivering such content which addresses their pain points which has a comprehensive marketing impact and it can drive sales and yield satisfied customers.

User Experience

The user experience is the most important element which ensures the success of business in terms of enterprise mobility landscape. If a mobile app is incompetent, puzzling, annoying or illogical either way customers will not be interested in using it. User experience is not limited to, design there are lots of more factors – For more information check the Mobile App Testing.

Quality assurance relates to various verticals of mobility, i.e. – user interface, the capabilities, device compatibility and features, the speed of the app and many more. It has been observed mobile consumers show the least acceptance for downbeat experience, therefore a seamless experience for services or products should be provided.

Value Addition

There is a popular theory of Sales: “People don’t buy your product or service, rather they need a solution to their problems”. The deployment of the app should be aligned to help users accomplish their goals in a way which is convenient, fast, secure and irrespective of location and time. Since for any task you may find thousands of apps, the better you will do value addition for them, there are higher chances of being widely adopted by the customer base. To achieve this, businesses’ approach towards mobility should lay the customer first thereafter brand.

Enterprise Mobility Trends: 2015 and Onwards

Biggest benefits for companies supporting mobile use at work:

Challenges in Enterprise Mobility

Despite mobility has proved its major role in the consumer space, still decision maker’s grapple with a plethora of security, maintenance and unexpected technical concerns on the radar of enterprise mobility.

Here are the top 10 challenges in Enterprise Mobility:

1.    Security

There is no doubt BYOD has ultimate benefits – from cost savings to productivity, but for IT departments it is a challenge to ensure security and compliance.

There is a perception that BOYD can lead a breach to security.

Mobile provides direct access to many applications. It creates a security concern for IT department, as it can give attackers access to secret information such as PIN, passwords, business, and personal email, corporate documents, and access to corporate networks and applications.

2.    Providing mobile data access

Even though your employees are mobile, they need to access the company’s data for getting information and act.

3.    Corporate Data Protection

It is imperative to protect corporate data and none of the organization can allow any breach in it. If an organization could not take leverage of proper technology, it could be challenging, as they are being accessed through multiple devices, various locations to access and store.

4.    Diversity of devices, OS ….

Dzone has recently revealed that building native apps for multiple platforms (50%), testing efficiency (53%) and lack of skilled mobile developers (40%)” are the biggest pain points. Hence it may lead to backlogs which may impact the productivity of an employee, customer service along with abandoned key business initiatives

5.    Consistent Performance

Swiftness and efficiency are imperative when it comes to their enterprise apps. Sometimes any unusual circumstance can affect the performance. It is vital to have a backup and necessary Plan B as well as expert support to get rid out of it and ensure optimal performance in all circumstances.

6.    Providing a strong network backbone

Secure, reliable robust, scalable and consistent network infrastructure is the backbone of successful enterprise mobility. To get uttermost outage of enterprise mobility organizations needs to set up efficient network infrastructure for mobile working.

7.    Supporting a mobile workforce

Managing remote workforce who works remotely from the central command is quite challenging, there is the requirement of an easy-to-use, streamlined system through which IT support can manage multiple users, across multiple locations simultaneously.

8.    Skill shortages

Right skills at the right time are also one of the key challenges in the enterprise mobility landscape. We have experienced there is a skill crunch in terms of cybersecurity and networking. Enterprise mobility is an amalgam of different technologies which are integrated into mobility and result in a seamless, secure working.

9.    Cultural Hang-ups

Cisco has estimated that there will be a significant increase in global mobile data traffic of 10-fold growth by 2019, i.e. of 292 Exabytes per year. This will cause businesses to face the challenge of providing growing demand for data consumption and ensure that there is much IT control and security overall mobile devices, apps, data, and the expanding network.

This is a technical as well cultural challenge. To address this we first have to emphasize top security risks such as privacy, malware access of the intellectual property. Addressing these concerns can ultimately deliver a superior uninterrupted mobile experience.

10.    Managing employee expectations

2020 Study predicts that employee mobility will be a game changer in the business world. This will lead to an increasing demand for a certain level of enterprise mobility by workers. To align with these organizations has to keep with the pace of time and provide the required technology and infrastructure so their employees can complete their tasks. Going one step ahead, it will lead to serving their clients in an optimum way.

Failing to do so there is a risk of losing the loyalty, revenue, brand reorganization and further their best talent. Therefore, organizations need to select virtualized tools and systems which can promote the agility and accessibility to control what they need to plan and manage their working.

Solution & Strategy

We are in the era of mobility, where instant access to information and quick response is a matter of success and failure for the business environment. Until the evolution of enterprise mobility, our smartphones had a limited scope of productivity. Now we have moved to a real-time business activity environment which is beyond e-mail access, messaging or browsing social media updates.

Working in a 24*7 environment is broadly recognized. Enterprise mobility dramatically accelerates the decision-making process as employees can instantly capture, share and deliver corporate data even when they are remotely located.

How Enterprise Mobility Can Transform the Global Businesses

Smartphone and other mobile devices have changed the way we live; communicate, the way we shop, the way we search, and the way we interact with our friends and family. In a similar way, mobility has revolutionized the business world.

With a corporate acceptance for BOYD mobile workers are getting access to real-time information and processes instantly, anywhere and on any device, it has considerably enhanced the operational efficiency and productivity.

This also gives enhanced flexibility to employees so they can work in a flexible way rather than the constraints of office hours to achieve a better work-life balance, ultimately benefiting the company by enhanced productivity.

Everything Becomes Faster

Speed, instant access, instant responses are synonyms of Mobility.

On the one hand, it enables buyers to buy a product or service whenever they are ready wherein it enables employees to communicate and share information and take decisions in real time. Consider your sales team is at a presentation with a client. The client asks to show him a demo for saying X service, and a particular presentation is not with him at his laptop. With mobility, your sales team has, not to worry as s/he can access the file in real-time and can share details with clients.

Everyone Can Be Productive, Everywhere

Ensuring optimal productivity is a real challenge for global enterprises as they have distributed workforce across different time zone and regions. Enterprise mobility best serves this problem as it gives the flexibility to work anytime, anywhere in a safe secure manner. With different access level, they can retrieve appropriate information required for processing.

A New Way to Reach Customers

In the digital business landscape customer want a product or service in his/her terms and conditions.  Mobility enables businesses to interact with customers in the way they like. It enables businesses to design customized offer in a manner where each customer is treated like a market. Also one of the biggest advantages of getting repeat customers

It is the power of mobility which turns a visitor into a customer. It enables customers to get quick access to their requirements in a convenient manner. They’ll turn to you in the future because they know you can deliver.

Staying One Step Ahead – Mobility isn’t a trend; its necessity of the business landscape across the world.

Summary:

Enterprise mobility is becoming the norm as it used to be websites several years back. Businesses that harness mobility can take leverage of digital transformation which lays them in a completely vibrant digital era. Enhanced employee’s productivity, data-driven business decisions, real-time support, seamless communication over email, documents, CRM can be accessed through mobile devices.

This all can be achieved with the power of mobility, without compromising corporate data security, user experience, and personal information misuse or any security breaches.

Checks are you ready to deploy enterprise mobility within your organization?