Tackling the Mobility Management Challenge

What happens when an organization becomes a "Mobility Enterprise"; an enterprise that is able to take full advantage of mobile work as the archetypical work life?

• Employees are more productive at work while maintaining a flexible work/life balance.
• Technology and operational departments aren’t overwhelmed with the increased support, security and compliance requirements that come with a highly mobile workforce.
• Executives embrace the speed and reach of mobility and seek ways to leverage it for increased business performance.

But becoming a Mobility Enterprise requires a fresh look at an organization's technology approach. Why?

1. Businesses don't have mobile workers and non-mobile workers anymore. Everyone is mobile and so is most data. Employees don't think of being on the LAN or on the WAN or at home or at the airport. They are just on the Internet and they want to be in touch with their applications and data at all times. If the business doesn't provide this for users, they will figure out how to do it themselves and unintentionally put the business at risk.

2. Security and compliance requirements have increased dramatically and a large portion of the exposure is from mobile users. Fast growing mobile populations are making it very difficult for IT organizations to meet internal and regulatory compliance requirements at a time when  IT organizations are under stress to drive customer and business value while keeping down costs. Mobile operations and compliance programs can be major distractions from this goal and can be quite costly.

3. Enterprises today are trapped behind the corporate firewall. The last decade of IT investments started from an assumption that users and devices are connected to the corporate network. But being "LAN-locked" can dramatically impair mobile operations, mobile compliance, and user productivity.

Meeting this Mobility Management Challenge requires businesses to tackle these shifts in the corporate mobile architecture. They must do so in an environment that is changing every 4-6 months, versus the more typical 12-18 month technology cycles of the past.

The bottom line to meeting this challenge is shifting the mindset to mobility being the new base case for IT planning, versus being the corner case, because today there are more mobile workers than stationary workers (seat warriors).

The upside of meeting this challenge is becoming a Mobility Enterprise that is boundary free allowing it to move at the speed of mobility.