of executives surveyed 4Q17 list support costs as the number one contributor to enterprise mobile costs
While the complexities of mobile support are often lost on the C-suite, the cost of that support is not. Controlling costs continues to be executives’ top concern about mobile, and support was pegged as the number one contributor to that cost by 42% of executives responding to a recent survey. To put that into perspective, consider the nine additional factors executives cited as contributing to mobile’s TCO (total cost of ownership):
In addition to operating under the watchful eye of executives monitoring its cost, mobile has begun attracting the oversight of line-of-business (LOB) decision-makers as well. LOB concern about productivity lost to downtime is ratcheting up – a likely result from the fact that LOB executives, not IT, are now funding mobile 74% of the time.
The day after mobile is deployed, Help Desk teams can find jarring the wide-reaching aspects of support – especially if those teams are expected to deliver to mobile users the same level of assistance associated with desktop and network operations. “Day Two” mobile support more closely resembles customized, one-on-one assistance than the traditional Help Desk scenario. Post-deployment, Help Desk staff need to understand how users leverage mobile to get their jobs done, and how the use cases for mobile vary widely across the enterprise. For that reason, mobile support needs must extend past mobile devices and infrastructure to include individual users’ role and function in the organization.
The “one size fits all” approach to support that worked with desktops and laptops does not work with mobile given the variety of device types in use today. Just 10 years ago, mobile users in the enterprise generally chose from one or two devices. Today, enterprise users expect to select from a wide array of mobile devices. As a result, rugged, consumer, corporate-owned and employee-owned devices that come in through Bring Your Own Device initiatives co-exist in enterprises’ mixed device type environments. A decade ago, those supporting mobile needed to be technically proficient at one or two device types. Today’s mobile complexity requires that support teams master a wide array of devices and device types.
Across the enterprise, the number of devices per user has risen sharply, further complicating mobile support. Today, the average number of mobile devices per user has jumped to 5.8 with many users having smartphones, tablets and wearables. Keep in mind that all of these devices can have different operating systems, MDM platforms and applications to support.
In addition, the velocity of forced upgrades to the mobile platform also complicates support. For example, desktop computers receive major operating system (OS) upgrades every one to two years. With mobile, however, major OS changes come at a rate of every six to 12 months, with minor upgrades happening in between. Some device manufacturers are making it extremely difficult for users and their support teams to control how users accept these upgrades. In addition, the constant stream of mobile application changes to patch bugs or add new features mixes with ongoing OS changes to create a dynamic state of mobility within the enterprise. As a result, a perfect storm of changes to OS, applications and devices is happening nearly every week across corporate America. This accelerated speed of upgrades causes the complexity of supporting mobile to vastly overshadow desktop support.