Enterprise mobility has marked a significant change for progressive companies looking to succeed and grow steadily. It has altered how we communicate with both people and machines in our daily lives, and for businesses, it has reshaped their operations and customer interactions. To clarify, enterprise mobility goes beyond simply managing mobile devices and enabling a mobile workforce. It is evolving into a comprehensive organizational culture that fosters and speeds up innovation, integration, opportunities, and efficiencies, all while allowing choices and user access to enhance productivity, workflow efficiency, real-time collaboration, connectivity, and overall business profitability.

Crafting and driving a fool-proof enterprise mobility strategy needs a well-organized thought process weighing all the possibilities, technicalities, challenges, and risks factors. So, what exactly should the companies know about a strategy for enterprise mobility? There are more than a couple of factors!

  1. Evaluate the importance of having an enterprise mobility strategy

Even before having an enterprise mobility strategy in place companies should first ensure that they understand what enterprise mobility is and why they would need it. At the same time, they need to evaluate how much expertise they have around mobile technologies and what the company can achieve by incorporating these advancements. It’s imperative to assess the ways enterprise mobility will add value to the employee and customer experience and whether it will make a difference in the business, the core products or the services. Also, companies must evaluate the better business opportunities that can be brought in by enterprise mobility and ways to capitalize on those. The first step is to have a 360-degree view of enterprise mobility, its possibilities, ROI, impact on business, users, customers and product and the long-term benefits.

  1. Your enterprise mobility strategy needs an effective plan

The next step is to create a holistic plan including all the parameters and considerations around enterprise mobility and that includes buy-in time and commitment from the decision makers as well. Once the company figures out how the business goals and objectives can be better driven via mobile solutions, which can further accelerate employee productivity and company revenue, they will next have to launch a plan of initiatives. This enterprise mobility plan will have all the clarifications about the company’s digital maturity level, corporate vision, employee training requirements, IT and security requirements, implementation and integration of mobile technologies, impact on customer experience and employee interactions, risks, constraints and challenges concerning adaptability and costs. A flawless plan will have to be created in the form of documents, presentations, graphs and images, and references.

  1. Assess the industry performance and identify the use cases

Companies need to analyze what and how their competitors in similar industry are doing with enterprise mobility and this requires extracting some data and evaluating some potential possibilities as per the company’s digital maturity level. Competition and industry analysis will give a clear picture of how enterprise mobility can expedite business growth with an all-rounder approach and at the same time, it will unveil the varied innovative and technological opportunities that the company can lever to drive organizational mobility. Post that, it’s time for use-case assessment across the business line and the company’s core functional areas that can be enhanced with mobility. Here, it might help to have discussions with targeted departments and brainstorm some potent ideas around how the employees can improve their daily yield and mitigate performance delays by using enterprise applications, handheld devices, mobile CRM, digital self-help tools and apps, and other mobile and digital platforms.

  1. Understand the scope of application of your enterprise mobility

Mobility is a highly volatile space and companies that are on top of syncing the customer and user expectations with IT effectiveness always have an upper-hand over competitors. There’s no dearth of possibilities when it comes to developing enterprise apps to promptly solve customer problems and to enhance employee productivity at all levels. But companies should also have a plan for their regular updates and better functionality. Companies should ideally asses their business needs that can be met via enterprise mobility and explore the varied options like business apps, self-help software, enterprise communications platforms, enterprise devices, collaboration and automation software and so on. It’s always advisable to follow agile methodologies when it comes to strategizing a mobility roadmap. Taking a DevOps approach to leverage the coordination between developers and the operation team also has its own benefits to drive mobility.

  1. Analyze your IT requirements for creating a mobility framework

The next step should be to create a mobility framework to standardize the IT operations and infrastructure, which will complement the company’s existing IT regulations like BYOD and data security policies, risk management, mobile readiness, IT/business restrictions and so on. This can be achieved by working it out with the right technology solution vendor who can offer the relevant features and potential capabilities to smoothly drive this mobility framework in accordance with the company IT policies, requirements and maturity, customer use cases, digital maturity, and existing skill set. While choosing the right vendor, companies should analyze capabilities like service interpretation, support for 3rd party enterprise integration, knack towards innovation, agility, and scalability, business performance, security and audit compliance, analytics and device management expertise, app and content management, identity management and other contextual aspects.

  1. Measure the business impact and the ownership cost of enterprise mobility

It is going to be very crucial to justify the returns from your enterprise mobility strategy and this is where decision makers play a vital role by weighing the outcomes of the two elements – business impact and cost of ownership, alongside. There’s no doubt that mobility in enterprise devices brings in opportunity and enterprise-wide benefits but at the same time companies need to balance the outcomes with the associated costs of developing and integrating the corresponding mobile/digital solutions to figure out the business priority and to answer the question ‘is it really necessary for my business as a whole or is it going to be of value to just a department’? The business impact elements like productivity and improvements, customer experience, improved business growth, and enhanced analytics should be measured alongside the cost factors like app complexity, license costs, maintenance, upgrade, support and training costs.

  1. Create an enterprise mobility roadmap and implementation timeline

Last but the most significant part after defining all the aspects of this enterprise mobility strategy to define a roadmap and to create an execution plan. This includes deciding a timeline incorporating all the organizational priorities, business goals, departmental requirements and employee and IT training needs. Next, finalize the key performance indicators to assess if your roadmap is showing the desired results within the timeline and make iterations accordingly to stay agile, effective and contextual. A governance structure is needed to be prepared that would give a clear direction of project execution and operational alignment. This should be followed by creating a realistic budget, getting approvals and managing resources. Once the company gets started with the implementation of enterprise mobility and device management process, it is necessary to keep in mind that it should be first introduced as a pilot project wherein the results can be measured before expanding the scope of involvement.

Enterprise mobility as a concept is getting more and more ambiguous with the emergence and advancement of so many digital technologies at once, and often companies fall into a quicksand of confusion about which technology to imbibe and to what extent. Selecting and defining a technology stack backed by a flawless enterprise mobility strategy includes companies answering simple questions around the industry sector they are in, what do the customers expect from them, how can they help employees do more in less time, how can they drive accuracy and process efficiency, how can they enhance employee performance, customer experience and overall business growth. Above all, two major things can never ignore in this entire process: data/IT security and user experience. Will talk about that in the next blog!