What Can We Say About Enterprise Mobility

So much has already been said about Enterprise Mobility that sometimes it is difficult to know what is important and what isn’t. With that in mind consider this post our attempt at creating an Enterprise Mobility conversation starter.

First a look at the numbers that justify the hype though – a recent Citrix Mobile Ecosystem report showed some huge numbers. Like an increase of 72% in the number of devices managed in the enterprise between 2014 & 2015 – just the one year! The report also showed that the typical employee used 3+ devices for work on a daily basis. This all ties in neatly with a Fliplet report that showed over 60% of workers using mobile apps for work. It is not hard to see why organizations are supporting these trends when you consider that this virtual extension of the employee’s work day is contributing as much as 240 hours of extra work per year. No arguments then – Enterprise Mobility is here to stay. But what are organizations doing with this added power?

Most of the Enterprise Mobility action falls into one of the following three categories:

Remote access of existing enterprise Apps: The enterprise has traditionally depended heavily on software based tools for all aspects of business. To start with a significant portion of the enterprise mobility action was, and still is, in allowing today’s more mobile workforce to seamlessly access these tools from their devices remotely – think of a sales team accessing a CRM like Salesforce.com while on the road. The focus of these apps has traditionally been to increase the productivity of the employees.
Leveraging the mobility capability to extend enterprise apps: The smart phone today has significant compute power and a lot of inbuilt capabilities like location awareness and sensors that enterprise apps of today are looking to leverage to do things that would just not be possible otherwise. This is where Enterprise Mobility has really come into its own by providing a winning value proposition. Examples abound in supply chain management and in specialised areas like healthcare technology, financial services – particularly payments using technologies like NFC and so on. These apps in many ways focused on the interface with the external environment – improving the customer experience, making the partner interface better and so on.
Data Gathering: This is the new frontier driven by wearables devices and the internet of things. All the devices employees and customers are carrying are gathering and sharing data back with the enterprise at all times. The next phase in Enterprise Mobility will be driven by Analytics – apps that allow gathering exactly the right data at just the right time to present to systems within the organization that draw out insights to help them gain a competitive advantage. The focus of these apps will be on better business intelligence and organizational efficiency.

That’s not to say that there are no bumps on this road. The two biggest are:

Security: This is probably the single biggest issue that enterprises adopting a more mobile outlook have to deal with. The larger number of devices and access points create a security headache for the organization that is not trivial to address. Ben Salama, Global Connected Operations Lead at Accenture, makes the point, “While the proliferation of the BYOD trend has brought many benefits for businesses from cost savings to productivity gains, for IT departments it has meant a security and compliance headache.”
Device Management: With a proliferation of devices comes a management headache – several different operating systems, form-factors and network access characteristics for the IT Department to deal with. The Citrix survey we mentioned earlier showed iOS to be the most popular mobile OS in the enterprise but this is a challenge since most of the other enterprise computing infrastructure is likely to be based on Windows. All these devices have to be managed and the apps that will work on them have to deal with this added complexity without any loss of functionality – no wonder Mobile Device Management tools are having a field day.

Despite the challenges the value the enterprise can gain from becoming mobile is not in doubt any longer. This is why the question most enterprises are looking to answer is not whether they should go mobile but rather how they should go about doing it. If you need help answering that particular question then we can help!