When it comes to IT strategy, mobile is often seen as a commodity that the business needs to spend the least amount of money on as possible.
However, as mobile technology becomes increasingly paramount to the success of the business through productivity gains, how you invest in your mobility strategy is crucial to maximising business performance.
We hear about businesses that suffer bill shocks and do not understand how and why they have ended up in such a position. This is often the case where inappropriate tariffs have been selected based purely upon base cost criteria.
The selection process usually takes place without considering what security measures are needed to protect the business, as well as the ways in which excess mobile utilisation costs could be minimised, this could be through implementing data compression or bespoke roaming tariff plans, for example.
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Taking responsibility for mobile strategy
Often IT teams are left out of the loop when it comes to mobile as it isnt seen as an integral part of the IT strategy. This could lead to a lack of understanding of what is required in terms of security across the mobile estate and no real consideration being given to product suitability as part of an overall IT strategy.
While most businesses are savvy enough to put in place a basic Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution, this is only the start of a successful enterprise mobility journey. The lack of true technical expertise in the decision making process creates far more opportunity to expose the business to risks that MDM can’t look after.
Every day across sectors such as legal, finance and professional services, and manufacturing staff will be moving between sites or working from a clients location, using either mobile data that your company pays for, or logging onto different WiFi sources to carry out their daily working tasks, without giving it a second thought.
The most successful mobile strategies look at every user individually and design the best mobile working environment, from device to data, for each staff member uniquely. This way it helps to ensure that each user is allocated the most appropriate tariff and best practices are being adopted wherever possible.
Read more on the next page to understand the decision-making process you should embrace and how employees will be using devices in order to make sure the investment is the right one.
