Five steps to making mobility work

Are you missing a trick? Some organisations are only considering email and internet access in their mobility plans. But this is only the tip of the iceberg for work mobilisation. And the potential benefits are significant.

Untapped opportunities

We’re starting to see organisations getting smarter about bring-your-own (BYO) and taking steps to secure their devices and data. But I still see many who are missing the point when it comes to capitalising on opportunities to improve employee satisfaction and productivity by enabling people to use consumer technology (smartphones, tablets, apps etc) at work.

Some organisations still only allow their people to use smartphones and tablets to access email and take notes in meetings. This low-ambition approach also makes it very difficult to justify the IT spend on new devices and the associated controls with a clear return on investment.

It’s about working smarter

A good enterprise mobility strategy focuses on empowering employees by making the right information, expertise and processes accessible to people when they need it, wherever they are working, across devices.

There are many factors involved in mobilising your organisation and every organisation is at a different point on the journey to mobility. But here are five steps to make the journey smoother:

1. Build the business case first – it’s surprising how often it’s missed – usually because of the reactive way in which IT has to respond to business demands
2. Put end users first – get them involved right from the start and they’ll be more likely to use the devices to their full potential
3. Plan for the future – develop a secure, multi-vendor approach and strike the right balance between economies of scale and the complexity of managing a range of smart devices
4. Make sure it’s all properly secured – especially because of the increasing number of people who are accessing corporate networks with their own devices. Employee-owned devices will be compromised by malware at more than double the rate of corporate-owned devices by 2014^*
5. Align your HR and IT policies – you need policies that are clear and consistent about where responsibility lies

What it looks like when it works

Network Rail is a great example of an organisation that has successfully embraced mobility. And this is a project that certainly didn’t lack ambition. The aim was to equip front-line workers with smartphones that they would really want to use and look after on a daily basis. The devices gave the team the ability to capture information digitally and process it centrally, enabling them to predict and prevent problems, rather than fixing them when they occur. Read the full case study here.

O2 can help you leverage technology to work smarter – no matter where your business is on the journey to mobility.

Find out more about how a well-developed and managed mobility strategy will deliver tangible business benefits. Or to arrange a Managed Mobility discovery session, call us on 01235 433507 

Sources

^* gartner.com/technology/topics/byod.jsp