Enterprise Mobility: The Present and Future of the Business World

Mobility is rapidly changing the lifestyle of modern-day citizens. The recent disruption of mobile apps in consumer life is helping people to conduct daily chores or complete their personal tasks. It has completely changed the way how we bank, travel, learn and has completely changed the landscape of those businesses. The businesses are also recently growing at an unimaginable pace and most of its credit goes to the recent technology innovations which includes the mobile tech. The use of mobility in enterprises is called Enterprise Mobility.

Employees are able to keep track of the incoming, outgoing calls, SMS and emails because of Enterprise Mobility implementations which have a huge effect on the company’s operation and functioning. This has improved employee productivity. The ability to access relevant data at any point and share a device screen with a customer or colleague has enabled the easy transfer of knowledge. If the business has a sales team, they will be able to access the data from anywhere and even from the client location and improve the sales. If the business has the field teams, the employees can share their location information to log the position of the device. This can be very helpful if there are possible risks for the employee like getting trapped or lost in mines or desert.

The mobile devices play a key role in communication, especially in big organizations with multi-layered organization structure. It offers the cross-level communication channels across departments and facilitates teamwork to ultimately provide higher ROI. Apart from this, there are some hidden benefits like cost savings and employee morale which also affect the business by a huge margin.

A recent survey by VMWare says that 40% of the businesses out of the surveyed are trying to improve their mobility strategy for numerous reasons such as team collaboration, individual productivity gains and increase customer engagement. 71% of the surveyed companies are trying to develop and deploy the customer-facing apps to improve customer experience. There are various models through which the organizations can implement Enterprise Mobility like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), COPE (Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled) and CYOD (Choose Your Own Device).  All the models have their own advantages and disadvantages.

The BYOD model is the one which the employees use their personal devices for work. That way they can work faster and efficiently as they are already comfortable in using that device and don’t need extra training and hence brings more satisfaction and saves cost for the organization. But it also implies great data security risks and device management issues. The COPE model is the one in which the company provides the devices and also allows the employees to use for their personal use upto a certain amount. The employees using these devices don’t need to struggle a lot if they face some issues with the device because of the IT departments of the organizations. The company has greater control over these devices as they are the ones who get to decide which apps/ softwares to install in the device and hence has fewer risks in terms of data security. This model imposes quite some costs on the organization as they need to acquire those devices. The CYOD model is similar to the BYOD model with the only difference of freedom to choose devices. This brings more control over data and devices. But this option can impose high costs on the organization as the prices can be very high for some devices.

Given the need of the time for Enterprise Mobility interpretation, nearly every organization has either already implemented or is currently implementing the Mobility systems through one of the above or hybrid models. And as we are progressing further in technology, the organizations are also continuously improving those mobility solutions.