How to overcome mobility challenges in your digital transformation
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The road to becoming a mobile-first organization isn’t without its business, security and technology challenges. Companies that win at enterprise mobility overcome these challenges through the proper application of technology, policies and processes.
The following are some mobility challenges you may face and how to approach them:
Personal and corporate data on employee devices
Bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies continue to be a challenge, even for organizations that have been at it for a few years.
Getting past BYOD pain points requires a cross-functional team with active participants from the business and IT sides of the house. If you currently offer or want to offer a BYOD stipend, implementing a split-billing solution helps ensure your organization stays on budget and your users get the stipends they deserve, according to VDC Research. Split-billing solutions data can also be set to flow into your mobile security solution to provide data points for common user activities.
The intermingling of personal and corporate data makes data governance a major BYOD pain point. You’ll need to enforce your company’s data ownership policies through user education and mobile content management policies set in your enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution.
Cybersecurity stakes rise
Getting past the cybersecurity pain point requires an arsenal of approaches. You’ll need multi-level security thinking with mobility-focused user security training, security policies and a holistic approach to EMM by integrating threat intelligence, identity access management (IAM), analytics and even endpoint security into the platform to create a holistic mobile security solution for your organization.
Next, step up your anti-malware strategy to keep your corporate devices free from unauthorized software and include the strategy as part of your user security training.
ROI to show business value
Though you should focus on the technology and security challenges of going mobile, you can’t lose sight of your return on investment (ROI) for the move.
Ensuring your mobile initiative boosts ROI requires mapping more of your mobility goals to new revenue or service delivery opportunities. Think more about field sales enablement and helping field employees better serve your customers. Though improving employee satisfaction and productivity is a traditional goal of a mobility initiative, maturing it means aligning with the bottom line of the business.
Work with stakeholders and your financial team to determine how your organization can capture the ROI of going mobile , then give managers the tools and processes to chart it for reporting purposes. According to Business 2 Community, capturing mobile app ROI includes the following steps:
- Calculating improved user productivity (for example, improving response to customers)
- Capturing what role, if any, the mobile apps play in the acquisition of customers (such as sales enablement and CRM tools)
- Analyzing app usage against improving internal collaboration and communications
It comes down to capturing how going mobile improves the bottom line of your company.
Virtual assistants become a security concern
Virtual assistant apps coming to employee phones bring new security concerns. It’s time for your security team to analyze the potential vulnerabilities if virtual assistants are on BYOD devices or part of your mobility roadmap. Your security team should set the appropriate policies and rules to protect your data from potential breaches that could come from these technologies.
Mobile workforce and compliance
If Sarbanes-Oxley, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or another compliance program governs your business, expect new mobility challenges. It’s not impossible to have a compliant mobile workforce. You’ll need to work with your auditor and third-party security experts to ensure your EMM and endpoint security meet compliance standards.
Limited developer resources
Another challenge that should not be dismissed is mobile app development. For many, all the skilled and experienced developers are all working on billable projects. Overhead projects such as corporate mobile apps fall into the bottom of their priority lists. Though your enterprise app store will certainly provide approved mobile apps, use cases abound where organizations might have to develop custom apps in-house that will be made available through an enterprise app store. However, tight development resources make that a challenge.
Meeting the mobile app development challenge requires taking a simple approach to app development. Look into the benefits of mobile back-end-as-a-service and low-code tools so you can open mobile app development to more junior developers, knowledge workers or power users to extend your list of available developers for mobile app projects.
Though your organization will encounter some challenges, these hurdles will be manageable and your mobile transformation will certainly be worthwhile.
This post originally appeared on Mobile Business Insights on September 28, 2017. The site is no longer in publication.
My name is Will Kelly. I’m a technical writer and content strategist based in the Washington, DC area. I’ve written for corporations and technology publications about such topics as cloud computing, DevOps, and enterprise mobility. Follow me on Twitter: @willkelly
