Despite years of discussions on enterprise mobility and BYOD, there are very few real business use cases that demonstrate real ROI. While we have much to accomplish in our quest for the mobile enterprise, many lessons have already been learned; lessons we can apply moving forward.
First of all, we need to redefine what we mean by “enterprise mobility.” Yesterday’s “BYOD” was about giving employees physical, mobile devices. Today’s enterprise mobility is about actually giving them the tools they need to be productive. This goes beyond contacts, email, and calendaring capabilities; it focuses on creating a coherent work environment for employees so they have access to information they need and are able to cut through the jungle of overwhelming data. In this slideshow, David Lavenda, vice president of product strategy at harmon.ie, explores how/why enterprise mobility must change based on evidence of what has already worked and what has not during the first phase of mobile consumerization of the enterprise.
David Lavenda is vice president of product strategy, harmon.ie. For the past 20 years, David has served as an executive for a number of high-tech companies. After completing a undergraduate degree in physics, advanced studies in electrical engineering, and an MBA in marketing, David co-founded Business Layers, an identity management company, serving as VP marketing and product strategy from its inception until the company’s successful sale five years later.
Why Enterprise BYOD Must Change
Click through for more on how/why enterprise mobility must change based on evidence of what has already worked and what has not during the first phase of mobile consumerization of the enterprise, as identified by David Lavenda, vice president of product strategy at harmon.ie.
Workflow
Enterprise mobility is not about giving employees mobile devices and expecting them to do the same things that they used to do in the office, while on the go.
It is about new ways of working, fostering the behavioral changes that need to happen so people can be productive when on the go and realignment of work/life balance expectations.
Apps
On-premises apps have not migrated to mobile devices very well.
The mobile form factor and operating systems dictate that work be organized differently for smaller screens, where only one app can be active at any given time. The mobile experience has to track business processes within smooth single-app operations; the desktop experience of hopping between applications and browser windows just doesn’t work. The result; mobile devices have been relegated to personal productivity – contact, calendaring, email.
Security, Compliance and Provisioning
Mobile enterprise-grade security, compliance and provisioning require a different approach from consumer mobility.
When you own your own device, the world gets blurry between personal information and corporate information. What is acceptable in your private life may not conform to corporate policy. Organizations are struggling to deploy MDM solutions because secure containerization is more complex than it appears. The result – workers circumvent corporate security by signing up with popular cloud services like Dropbox, or they don’t use their mobile devices at all.
Data Management
Managing employees’ information must be reassessed.
Employees have both personal and business data on the same mobile device so organizations need a firm grasp on how to manage this. When employees quit or get fired, the separation of corporate vs. personal information is not so simple. Contact lists, and access to documents and other competitive information is becoming hard to rescind as employees increasingly store this information outside the purview of IT.
Collaboration
The ‘new’ enterprise mobility must not rely upon email as the central method for sharing information.
Trying to retrofit email into the mobile/cloud world is like trying to put better shoes on horses to compete with the automobile. IBM Verse, Microsoft Clutter, and Google Inbox are trying to patch email, but the train’s left the station. A fresh approach that integrates documents, social interactions and most importantly updates from operational systems must be taken. Because email is only one source of information workers need to do their jobs. Today, workers need to see information from a wide variety of sources to carry out their work responsibilities.
Flexibility
The new enterprise mobility must leverage mobile devices, couple them to freely available business cloud services and marry them into an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support business going forward.
A new paradigm of how to manage information will emerge to support this. Using email and search to share and find information will not scale – a new way of organizing information – using a variety of automated contextual filters will emerge; for example, automatically extracting topics from application updates and matching them across disconnected systems so information can be filtered effectively will be one way that employees will deal with information overload.
