complexities, along with others that are specific
to each enterprise’s environment, to be taken into account before the first device is deployed. From our experience, taking the time to properly plan a mobile deployment can dramatically lower the support costs and total cost of ownership of mobile over the life of the deployment.
Working exclusively in mobile for 34 years has given Stratix a “front row seat” to mobile’s evolution – one of technology’s most rapidly advancing innovations. Today, Stratix’ unique perspective combines an understanding of the past, combined with the accumulated expertise needed to anticipate the future.
In the next few weeks, Stratix will publish a best practices-based informational series on how working with a MMS provider can solve mobile’s toughest challenges including the need to properly plan and deploy mobile across the enterprise.
An enterprise view drives the mobile planning process, which includes three distinct phases:
Having a well-defined mobile strategy helps companies get the business results they expect from enterprise mobile. So much so that 76% of enterprise executives recently polled said they had created such a strategy and had taken the necessary steps to support it enterprise-wide.(4)
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
- Lewis Carroll
Ideally, every enterprise will have a strategic vision that spells out how it intends to leverage mobile to improve operational efficiency, better serve customers and change the competitive landscape. Executives from the C-suite, IT and key lines of business should participate in this vision-setting because mobile has the capacity to touch every operation in the enterprise. Often, a Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE) oversees mobile visioning at the enterprise level.
During the Assessment phase, look for opportunities to use mobile to improve business operations, more deeply penetrate existing markets and reveal new business opportunities. Focusing solely on devices and deployments can be counted on to distract companies from plotting a course to mine the business value that lies in mobile.
As noted in our last paper, over 74% of all mobile projects are not driven now by IT, but by lines of business (LOB). As these business units define their needs for mobility and select the devices, management software and managed service providers that are used, the risk of creating highly fragmented siloes is very real. These silos put enterprise mobile at risk and should be avoided.
Often, enterprises engage with a Managed Mobility Services (MMS) provider to gain insights into mobile’s best practices and coming technology advances, and unite individual LOB’s mobile projects with a shared strategy and common objectives. This outside perspective, especially if it comes from a MMS provider with deep mobile-specific expertise, can help the enterprise build a strategy that lasts over time. In addition, bringing an MMS into the assessment process allows the enterprise to benefit from what the MMS has learned in more implementations than a single enterprise could ever experience.