Connected,
IoT and Mobility have been the buzzwords since past two years and the echoes
are, undoubtedly, growing across the industry. The organizations are embracing the mobility as long lost enabler, which has come to the rescue, and
promises improved efficiency and always connected work force. The change has
been much more dramatic than what we saw around 10 years back when industry
embraced Laptop, as Laptops were ultimate device to enable mobility, the title
which Blackberry took lately. But all these implementations of mobility were
spearheaded by IT department in the organization. But over the years multiple
models of mobility roll-out has taken place. The area of mobility now is no
more limited to mobile devices and laptops used by work force, it is increasing
as purpose build hardware, tablets and other connected devices have made it all
but manageable.
The
situation offers an opportunity to System Integrators to wear their consulting
hats and help organizations to make this mobility roll-out cost effective and
manageable.
Over
past years while working as Digital Product & Solutions Consultant, I met
customers who want to improve business efficiency but at the same time doesn’t
want to implement Device Management ecosystem in their enterprise. A further
probe into such preconceived perception clarified that a misconception pervades
all the efforts to such solution rollout, which is that most of Senior
Executives confuse Mobility management with “restricting Mobility”. The
perception of restricting the usage of organization assets like laptop using
various mechanisms still governs the thought process, and this is leading to
suboptimal roll-out of mobility in enterprises. Mobility management is not only
about security policies, but it includes:
- Supporting/trouble shooting devices when these are in a far flung village with a field executive
- Safeguarding enterprise data when these devices have fallen to wrong hands
- Simultaneous roll out of enterprise apps like salesforce, CRM, & ERP to all deployed devices
- Segregate employees data from corporate data (If that is necessary)
- And lastly ensuring enterprise security policies are implemented across all devices (these policies varies from enterprise to enterprise, so if you really don’t want your employees to face any restricted access, then just avoid creating highly restricted device profiles)
Managing
mobility in enterprises is as important to managing core IT infrastructure, as
the whole purpose of such roll-outs is defeated if this is not managed. This
opens a new business opportunity to services organizations who can provide
managed mobility services to their customers which doesn’t restrict itself to
device management only but spans across to complete eco-system including device
provisioning, app deployment, app-store management, updates management and
auditing. As they say “You can’t manage, what you can’t measure”, its not a
metaphor anymore for Managing Enterprise Mobility
