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There are organizations that’re leveraging mobility to their business benefits and then there are organizations mired in the ambiguities of where to start from to what solution to deploy. Let’s take a look at issues that hold IT managers back from deploying the right mobility solutions and reaping the benefits.
- Enterprise mobility itself will remain ambiguous if constituents fail to figure out what mobility means for businesses- -which he considers to be the most important point, asserts Jayanta Prabhu, CTO, Essar.
- The ambiguities exist around policies. With BYOD being the mandate, formulating policy that can help both employee and employer accrue benefits is a challenge. Plus, there is no set standard which companies can follow.
- Convincing the top management about security creates a lot of confusion. So, while BYOD can offer benefits such as improved productivity and cost savings, it can also open the door to risks to corporate data security and protection.
- The perception of mobility among IT managers is largely influenced by the way vendors pitch mobility to them. The industry is highly segmented and IT managers meet several vendors as they talk about different mobility offerings. For example, some vendors talk about Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP), some about Mobile Device Management (MDM), and some Mobile Application Management (MAM) platforms from a BYOD perspective. Deciphering the jargons is a challenge for IT managers.
- The confusion also arises from the lack of education and expertise in these technologies, as it doesn’t help them evaluate the capabilities of these technologies; the technologies have been floating around but nobody understands them thoroughly from the mobility standpoint.
- The other confusion exists around the development of an app which runs on open source, versus a platform which is about managing all aspects of the mobile development lifecycle. Now, the big question is what do they do to ensure effective mobility plan?
- The mobility market from the vendor perspective is also highly segmented. On one side of the curve, there are big players like IBM, Cisco and SAP, and on the other, there are comparatively smaller players. “There are small shops mushrooming inIndiathat lead to confusion,” says Prashant Sharma, Country Leader, MobileFirst, IBM India. “The smaller players who do not have the capabilities to offer an end-to end solution often pitch standalone technologies to IT managers.
Solutions
There is a set of people who are well educated about this trend and they have done their homework; and there’s another set of people who struggle to understand the benefits they can reap out of enterprise mobility. So, there are two sides of the coin. It all depends on the maturity and understanding of the people who are buying it and also the vendors who interact with them closely. The bottom-line is, it is very important for ITDMs to have clarity on their requirements and not be influenced by vendors, and the rest will follow.
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