Originating Author: Kaushik Das
Enterprise mobility allows enterprises to carry out day-to-day business without tying employees to their desks. With enterprise mobility, employees move about freely without compromising on accessing desired resources or providing services to their customers. It brings tremendous value in productivity and accountability as employees, who are on the move, and are also able to access enterprise data, resources and application freely and securely from anywhere and at any time. The components for enterprise mobility consist of laptops with Internet activity, cellphones or PDAs that work in conjunction with suitable backend infrastructure.
Enterprise mobility brings about improved communications and collaboration. According to Alinean (http://www.alinean.com), the desirable impacts of mobility are:
- Increased efficiency for laptop users - a 13% higher hourly work output each week over their desktop counterparts.
- More than 50% of wireless employees use their notebooks at home, and nearly 40% also use them at hotspots.
- 70% of notebook users cite flexibility in work locations and hours
The IT managers face significant deployment and operational challenges when (they) consider transitioning to a mobile enterprise as follows:
- Getting the right applications in place for evolving the right mobility strategy
- Identifying the business challenges for different types of users, e.g. top management, sales or field executives and prioritizing their requirements
- Building new applications or integrating with the existing ones, i.e. mobile-enabling the existing applications.
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Capability of enterprise mobility initiative
Enterprise mobility provides the following capabilities:
- Increased productivity because of flexibility in collaboration while on the move
- Better service delivery to customers
- Improved service quality due to shorter response time to requests
- Faster decision making through real time information visibility that helps generate more business
- Secure Access to corporate data anytime and anywhere
- Better utilization of enterprise resources
Enterprise mobility brings improved opportunities for collaboration across time zones, national boundaries, and continents. One of the important goals of enterprise mobility is out-of-office connectivity between employees and the enterprise, clients and business associates, anytime, anywhere. For example, with enterprise mobility, faster distribution of internal information, alerts, service bulletins, etc. to out-of-office and field sales and support personnel becomes extremely convenient.
Specific operational goals of enterprise mobility initiative
Expected effects on the IT budget
A significant issue for an IT manager is to implement an effective, reliable, cost-effective enterprise mobility solution with low total cost of ownership (TCO). This is particularly true since all the benefits of the system will accrue to business operations, while the IT budget will have to absorb an increase in infrastructure spend.
The TCO includes:
- Initial implementation costs including handset, PDA and laptops and other hardware, software, installation and training
- Cost for wireless data services or plan
- IT management (upgrade, maintenances) and end-user support costs
For a ball-park estimate of TCO for a mid-size organization, see the table below. These figures assume a Standard Wikibon business model organization with $1 billion in revenue, with 4,000 employees and an IT budget of $40 million per year.
Item | Estimated Cost | Estimated Total Cost |
---|---|---|
Deployment cost |
| $5.8-to-6.4M |
Wireless data plan | $50*4000*12 | $2.4M per annum |
IT management (upgrade, maintenances) and end-user support costs | Cost for 10-12 IT management FTE | $1.4-1.8M per annum |
Source: SanPro
A successful enterprise mobility implementation will:
- Increase productivity because of flexibility in collaboration – employees will collaborate while on the move
- Provide better service delivery to customers
- Improve the quality of service in
- Help employees make decision- making faster because real time visibility of information and resourcsresources
- Help employees access corporate data anytime and anywhere securely
- Better utilization of enterprise resources
Employees reap benefits of enterprise mobility as follows:
- Flexibility in work hours and day extension
- Flexibility in work location while in the office, such as in meetings, in other offices and in ad-hoc workgroups
- Access to information and network applications - while not at a desk – traveling, client site, on-road via a hotspot
- Efficient voice communication including cost efficient roaming while travelling
The major expected business productivity improvements will normally include:
For an enterprise, mobility brings productivity gains as follows (according to Alinean):
- Flexibility for group activities and work - 19% improvement
- Timeliness of communication via e-mail - 19% improvement
- Ability to conduct remote meetings - 16% improvement
Enterprise mobility initiative
Analyze Phase
Acceptance test considerations:
A successful enterprise mobility analysis is complete when the sponsor (or the stake holder) considers the initial business case and accepts it. In particular, a business benefit analysis has been performed such that the sponsor has agreed to the fact that the benefits will only come from the business and not from the IT (cost savings) due to the large increase in infrastructure spend. Upon acceptance, the sponsor will proceed to the design phase.
Key analysis milestones:
- Business value vs cost issues
- Main considerations: operational efficiency, controls, customer service, quick turnaround, competitive advantage and information availability.
- Requirements for different types of users, e.g. top management personnel uses enterprise mobility to access information that is critical to the enterprise, whereas for a sales person on the field, it means the ability to report on the move and for field executives have the possibility of executing who executes online transactions using ERP.
- Consider the business imperative and how much of competitive advantage an enterprise can gain by mobile-enabling all segments of its employees. For some organizations, drivers for enterprise mobility could be sales promotion and for some it could be customer service that wants mobility as an enabler to resolve customer queries and issues across the desk.
Key business objectives defined and presented:
- Design a first-pass enterprise mobile system and get agreement on the budget by considering cost of equipment, services, IT staff, and user staff to implement and maintain
- Get agreement on implementing legal compliance (the legal team must validate the requirements). For example, get agreement on reducing email risks (such as litigation, fines) in the form of judicial discovery
- Keep an eye on specific requirements that may be applicable such as SEC Rule 17a and Sarbanes-Oxley. In other countries, there will be country-specific industry legislation.
- Get different stake holders (such as IT, legal, record management) to agree to work as a team
- Get agreement on performance such as uninterrupted service, minimum downtime, easy access to backup records (and within a stipulated cost) and high-speed recovery
- Get agreement on key user productivity benefits
- Create a business case, present it to stakeholders, and get agreement to go to the design phase
Design Phase
Acceptance test considerations
The design phase will be deemed complete when the design has been accepted by the sponsor and agreed to by key groups such as IT, legal and record management, and agreement has been reached to proceed to the deploy phase or kill the initiative.
Key design milestones:
An enterprise mobility infrastructure may consist of several thousand mobile devices, wireless switches and access points. Large-scale deployments, common in manufacturing, transportation and logistics and retail industries will require a more complex infrastructure.
The architecture should be very
- Robust and secure – there is absolutely no scope for security loopholes.
- Flexible to address the device and application requirements as there is ain addressing the multiplicity of mobile types and operating platforms
- Flexible to deploy intelligent applications to address multimodal interaction.
- Robust for data synchronization and proper integration with existing enterprise resources
- Efficient within regard to selection of data and voice plan
- Primary vendor decided
- Decide on vendor hardware and software technologies available and issue RFP/solicit bids
- Enterprise mobility procedures designed
- Design procedures and processes around the hardware and software decided
- Enforce an enterprise mobility policy. State that working on the move demands certain restrictions as well as taking additional precaustions on the employees’ part. Employees should limit personal use of their enterprise mobile devices
- Enterprise mobility policies are updated to reflect latest regulation
- Policies should be documented and followed.
- Legal and compliance teams should review and approve changes
- Access to email and other data must require identification and authentication.
- Pay particular attention to maintain enterprise mobility according to the SLA.
- Determine training requirements for operations
- Design test procedures and scripts
- Design risk mitigation systems
- Design of internal audit systems to reduce risk if required
Deploy Phase
Acceptance test considerations:
The implementation phase is complete when the new enterprise mobility infrastructure is installed, tested and brought into service. The system should be evaluated for its performance, usefulness and user-friendliness. The (internal or external) auditors must evaluate the legal compliance, including the risk mitigation aspects of the new enterprise mobility infrastructure.
Organizations like to deploy email storage architecture by putting into practice certain activity milestones:
Key deployment milestones:
- Enterprise mobility infrastructure built
- Installation of hardware and software functionality
- Update and creation of new processes and procedures, with full documentation
- Enterprise mobility infrastructure tested
- Testing of equipment, software, and features (functionalities)
- Risk mitigation applications implemented
- Risk mitigation applications as designed, implemented and signed off by user departments
- Migration & Cut-over to new email storage infrastructure is completed
- End-user issues verified
- User training and documentation completed
- Update and creation of new processes and procedures, with full documentation
- Help desk operatives trained and documentation updated
- Business issues tested
- Testing for back up, availability, downtime and recovery
- Legal compliance issues, including capability for judicial discovery , revisited and verified
- Enterprise mobility infrastructure initiative wrapped up
- Procedures set up for full operation monitoring (availability, downtime, recovery)
- Procedures set up for weekly, monthly and annual testing
- Procedures set up for adding email storage, functionalities, and risk reduction applications
- Final review of documentation
- All project staff released and full hand-over to IT operations
Summary for enterprise mobility initiative
This initiative prepares a mid-sized business to face the new business reality of enterprise mobility and to achieve success by managing a well-architectured enterprise mobility infrastructure. It brings forward the justification to evaluate and consider an enterprise mobility infrastructure to satisfy the business need for accessing enterprise data, resources and application freely and securely from anywhere and at any time. Many organizations, both regulated and non-regulated, will soon determine that a properly architectured enterprise mobility is a sound business strategy that is necessary to reap the benefits of high-quality business communication.