One thing to keep in mind while deploying enterprise mobility solutions in your business: First and foremost, any solutions you use must provide complete end-to-end protection of your business data. That’s because, while mobilizing your business creates huge gains in productivity and efficiency, it also can create risk – risk to your company and customer data, and risk to your workers’ privacy.
Keeping that in mind, here are a few simple steps to take to mobilize your business.
Step 1: Establish Control
First, you need a solid Mobile Device Management (MDM)/Mobile Application Management (MAM) solution. MDM lets IT define what devices can connect to the corporate environment (personally owned and/or corporate-liable devices). It also lets them control and encrypt communications and data, and enforce policies on the tablets and smartphones used by workers.
MAM lets IT do the same with applications your business makes available to the workforce. Both directly address risks to corporate data and end-user privacy, and both offer different aspects of the control you need to enable. According to our research, most enterprises already use MDM and are currently in the process of either choosing or deploying MAM.
Those of you who fall into that camp, keep it up! Establishing control is an essential first step to enabling productivity. And if you need a bit of help in that regard, check out the Good Secure EMM Suites – specifically the Secure Management Suite or Secure Enterprise Suite.
Step 2: Enable Mobile Collaboration
With device and application management in place, the next step is to select from an existing ecosystem of secure mobile apps designed to work together to enable common and existing business workflows. Such an ecosystem enables workers at every level to use a combination of apps to get their work done – often in ways they never could before while sitting at a desk behind a desktop monitor.
Here a few examples of such custom app “mashups”:
- During a meeting at the client site, a sales rep downloads a quote from an email, edits it according to the client’s latest requirements, then presents it and gets the client’s in-person signature, closing a new deal right from her tablet.
- An attorney opens a confidentiality agreement, edits it with client particulars, gets it signed and uploads it to his firm’s servers.
- A customer service rep notices a problem with a client’s manufacturing equipment during an inspection. He opens a service ticket from his tablet, fills in the details, schedules an appointment for follow-up, then uploads everything to the company CRM and sends an email to both the client contact and the service rep confirming the appointment.
- A physician downloads a patient’s medical record, takes notes during the patient’s checkup, schedules follow-up tests and uploads everything back to the hospital system, at the same time automatically generating an email to the patient with all the details for her records. Test results are also sent automatically to the patient and the doctor.
These are all possible today, and companies are experiencing significant returns on their mobile workflow investments.
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Step 3: Deliver Mobile Productivity
While the ecosystem supported in Step 2 can take full advantage of any app collection you purchase, its capabilities are generally mapped to what those pre-existing, “off-the-shelf” apps can do. The next step is to transform your workforce’s capabilities with custom apps and custom app mash-ups purpose-built to meet the intricate needs of your organization.
Custom apps help you fine-tune how mobility impacts your business. They enable tight focus of new business processes around your team’s unique requirements and enable your workers undertake tasks in ways designed just for them. And if you don’t have your own development team, you can work with any number of external software development firms who’ve sprung up to work with businesses like yours.
Either way, there’s value in developing your own solutions: In a 2015 Red Hat Mobile survey, 90% of respondents indicated that they expect investment growth in mobile application development, with an average expected growth rate of 24%. Meanwhile, another survey by 451 Research revealed that approximately 50% of IT professionals plan to deploy at least 10 enterprise mobile apps by 2017.
As an example, see the ClaimsForce custom app prototype created by Innovi Mobile, built on the Force.com platform and secured by the Good Dynamics secure mobility platform. The app is designed to securely combine a number of service team capabilities into a single app: view, select and modify Salesforce.com service cloud cases, map the cases to see where the next service call is located, and utilize the presence-enabled instant messaging capabilities to let workers connect with the rest of their team.
Mobilizing your workforce comes down to those three streamlined steps – master them, and you’re well on the way towards tapping into the real power of mobility.
To learn more about each step – and how Good can guide you through them – you can view an archived version of our webinar Introducing Good Secure EMM Suites. You can also read The CIO’s Guide to Enterprise Mobility, look at the official Suites product page or view a demo of Suites in Hands-on with Good Secure EMM Suites. Finally, if you’re interested in learning about the current EMM landscape, check out Making Sense of the EMM Alphabet Soup – a detailed look at MDM, MAM & MCM.
