Critical Steps to get the Most from Mobility, Part 2

Critical Steps to get the Most from Mobility, Part 2

2 min read

Two weeks ago, we taught you the first step to any major enterprise mobility strategy: profiling your mobile workforce. Hopefully, by now, you have a good sense of exactly who you are building this solutions for, and how to theoretically create a solution that is appropriate to their tasks and skill levels. This is an important prerequisite to the adoption and effectiveness of any mobile initiative.

Today, we’ll take you through the next critical element of enterprise mobility strategy.

Step 2. Appoint a chief mobility officer

You probably know by now that mobilizing your business is not as quick or easy as buying something from an App Store. Sometimes, companies make the grave mistake of trying to automate a single process within their operations, and they hastily deploy a particular app, like sales, without thinking how it should be coordinated with other processes and channels, like expenses reporting, customer onboarding, and service activities. The result of this ‘project’ approach to mobility is a lot of redundant expenditures and wasted time.

To avoid these headaches, we agree with Forrester Research that it is best to appoint a Chief Mobility Officer to champion your mobile initiatives. This person will be responsible for understanding and coordinating the scale and diversity of mobile activities under way at your business.

Your Chief Mobility Officer should be a separate entity than your CIO or head of IT, even though these departments historically have held the reins on all things mobile inside the enterprise. Today, the decision to go mobile often generates from business and marketing functions that see the mobile channel as the new frontier for business growth, brand differentiation and deeper customer insights. The Chief Mobility Officer can therefore act as a liaison between technology and business staff, balancing security concerns with usability and customer engagement.

With one person heading all of your mobile initiatives, your business can avoid fragmentation of different mobile projects, enabling a comprehensive approach to mobility instead of individual initiatives in each department. Moreover, this person will be able to dedicate appropriate time to the planning, budgeting, research, prototyping and testing that is required for a successful strategy. They can navigate through the various devices and platforms, and how to handle things like BYOD and MDM. This dedicated time and effort will give you the security that you are investing in the right solution, and that you will be able to manage the inevitable challenges that come with its deployment. Such confidence is key in transformative initiatives like enterprise mobility.

Once your Chief Mobility Officer is in place, you can start to focus on the nitty gritty of enterprise mobility strategy. In the next few posts, we’ll take you through each one of these things: device selection, encouraging adoption, measuring ROI, security strategies, and integration options.

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