What the heck is enterprise mobility?
Remember when the government banned 90% of all currency overnight? The long queues at ATMs will be a conversation starter at parties for many years to come, I wouldn’t be surprised if I come across couples who met at ATM queues for the first time. The banking sector resisted technology and their infrastructure was not mobile/mobility compatible and demonetization caught them on the wrong foot. Over the last few months however, mobility is slowly transforming the financial sector.
Enterprise mobility is a ground-up approach to port any business operation to mobiles and laptops to empower employees to be more productive and flexible.
After all, moving operations to mobile sounds simple, just accessing emails on your phone, Right? Not! In the banking sector alone, it’s taken ages for employees to upgrade their work process from desktops and laptops to smartphones and tablets. And, this is just the first step in enterprise mobility. As transactions are made on-the-go, all operations require new-age systems like multi-level data protection and support infrastructure to handle any circumstances. The other sectors are further behind on mobility adoption curve.
Enterprise mobility is not limited to banking sector, it is critical to maintain business relevance across all sectors like telecommunications, manufacturing, energy and utilities, healthcare / pharmaceutical, transportation, retail, logistics, and automotive. Each sector poses it’s own challenges and require unique solutions based on business size, geographies, customers, internal processes and expected results. Sceptical IT teams have overcome the apprehension of introducing mobility in workplace to ensure relevance, competitive nature and optimised productivity.
Mobile is great, why hasn’t the world adopted enterprise mobility yet?
An excellent question! To begin with, CIOs are concerned with the ramifications of allowing sensitive corporate information on personal devices that are vulnerable to the whims and fancies of the Internet. And rightly so. They are mainly concerned with data security, scalable underlying infrastructure and ease of technology adoption by employees.
Data security
Information theft have both short-term (revenue loss and bad PR) and long-term residual impact by means of sensitive user information and strategic setbacks (loss of competitive advantage & legal ramifications). These losses average out from a few hundred thousand USD to a couple of million USD, depending on the source (Ponemon, Symantec). Smartphones are personal devices with millions of apps available for everything under the sun. These apps create vulnerabilities for enterprise apps that handle sensitive data and call for additional layers of security to prevent leaks of locations, conversations, etc. This can be managed well with good MAM implementation.
Infrastructure
Building a solution for employees is one thing, but regular maintenance and upkeep is quite another. The IT teams must ensure information flows seamlessly across different devices and multiple access points through secure and un-secure networks. Infrastructure, typically on-cloud as managed services, or a SaaS model offsets some burden away from internal IT teams who can focus on company’s long term mobility goals.
Enterprises constantly face challenges with newer devices that change frequently and have unique combinations of OS, underlying middleware and hardware across different screen sizes. IT teams constantly work to make sure these challenges do not disrupt their day-to-day operations for employees around the globe.
Employee Empowerment
Increasingly, employees determine technologies their employers adopt, and that’s driving BYOD. At the same time, enterprise mobility should increase productivity and there should be minimal learning effort spent to adopt the product. That’s where enterprises and it’s employees are at crossroads. Enterprises assume employees are mobile-savvy and adoption is simple, but in reality, educating employees about the process on a small screen takes significant effort creating another roadblock to adoption. This leads to many hours training in classrooms and forced adoptions that never work.
As a consequence, CIO teams follow the ‘not my problem’ doctrine, until it collapses. At that point, they scramble to build something quick and dirty for a temporary solution until it breaks down again. A few years ago, enterprises had a chance to experiment and fix if something went wrong, now it’s not the case. Productivity gained through mobilizing workforce is soo high, it puts business lightyears ahead of their peers and ensures they stay relevant in times of quick obsolescence.
Changing trends
Businesses and enterprises recognise the need for a mobile workforce, especially BFSI companies who are early adopters from the not tech. realm in mobility adoption. In this context, the Indian BFSI industry have their work cut out for them. Demonetization have created the right environment for overhauling mobility strategy and introduce banking to people in remote hinterlands while leveraging on newest technology like fingerprint scanning over smartphones. While mobility adoption by banks is not enterprise mobility in the truest sense, it is a good success story of technological enablement and a hard-to-beat precedent for other sectors to follow.
Adoption still remains a challenge as enterprise mobility proliferates. As an Intelligent Guide Composing Tool, Appunfold engages with app users consistently and continuously in the enterprise segment. Be it banks re-engaging with customers or with internal staff for sales updates, we take pride in awesomizing business continuity for businesses and customers. Great products just need a little nudge at the right time to be well-received by their target audiences.
