Mobility is no longer a trend which we can choose to follow or not. With the rise of BYOD and desktop virtualisation, an increasing number of employees are no longer tethered to a desk. While this can create a flexible and efficient model for users and businesses alike, who should shoulder the responsibility?

Consider the costs, security and compliance issues: there are strategic concerns that spread wider than just how you implement mobility throughout the company. The fact of the matter is, mobility opens the door to a whole host of legal and financial issues that IT probably don’t have the expertise to deal with.

UK-based enterprise IT experts OISG Group weigh up the argument…

A: IT cannot handle mobility on their own

Consider the wide-reaching implications of enterprise mobility to different departments:

Does IT really have the time, skills or inclination to coordinate these wide-ranging influences into one overall mobility strategy? The benefit of assigning a separate point-person is that they can shoulder the responsibility for the task of pulling together these ideas, concerns and requirements and presenting them to each of the other departments — like a universal translator.

B: They perfectly positioned to handle mobility

On the other hand, it could be argued that all of this liaising can indeed be managed by IT. Sure, there might be additional work during the planning phase, where another pair of hands may be needed to take care of the liaison part of the job, but their role would be limited in scope and duration. After the strategy has been drawn up and deployment planned out, each department can get on with their own responsibilities just fine with IT acting as a technical go-between.

The middle ground

The difficulty with this debate is that both sides have a valid point. Enterprise mobility has, at the moment, a limited impact on department processes in the long-term. So shifting around roles and responsibilities, perhaps even hiring some temporary help, seems like a waste of time and money.

However, asking a member of IT to run around doing all that liaising, drawing up documents, strategies, plans etc. is not what they were trained to do. So what is the middle ground?

By outsourcing the strategy, planning and liaison to a specialist supplier you can gain from their experience and expertise — enabling you to set up your enterprise mobility with the very besttechnology and best practices in the shortest time possible. These efficiencies, along with the solid framework an outsourced supplier will provide mean you can enjoy the best possible enterprise mobility without having to put anyone under too much pressure.

If you’d like to learn more about the importance of an end-to-end strategy when it comes to mobility, OISG Group are offering a free enterprise mobility guide.