You bought the mobile devices. Now make them work

Imagine you’ve bought a new mobile gadget for your home and then realised you didn’t really need it after all. Maybe you use it for one or two minor functions, or maybe it’s simply gathering dust behind the sofa.

 

Multiply that by a few thousand, and you have the state of play for many organisations’ mobile strategies.

 

It’s all too common for enterprises to invest in a crate of devices, hand them out far and wide, and then write them off. Are they being used as intended, and were they worth the money? No one knows.

 

It’s an oversight that can leave organisations with a wasteful mobile bill, and a dangerous level of security risk too.

 

 

The tempting trap of mobile deployment

From scanning warehouse inventory to taking retail sales, mobile devices are everywhere in business today. But having devices in people’s hands is not the same as having mobile embedded in how those people actually work.

 

One example that’s always stuck with me is a conversation with a healthcare organisation that had invested in tens of thousands of field devices with the intent to run medical record applications. Very digital, very efficient.

 

But when pressed, nobody could confirm whether clinicians were using them for that or were simply reverting to a different terminal and pocketing the mobile for something else. The investment was substantial, but what it delivered was anyone’s guess.

 

Once procurement has handled getting the devices bought and set up, it rarely checks in on if they are actually meeting their intended purpose.

 

Which applications does this person need? When? What does connectivity look like where they work?

 

If these things aren’t being tracked and acted on, the result will be devices sitting uncharged in lockers, staff reverting to workarounds, and organisations wondering why their mobile investment has not moved the needle.

 

 

Workflow first, device second

The thing that separates organisations that get real value from mobile from those that do not is largely one of sequencing. The question is not "how do we manage these devices?" but "what does this person need to do their job, and how does mobile support that?"

 

Answering this requires understanding workflows in granular detail before deciding on devices, applications, and connectivity. Which apps are mission-critical for a given role? When are they used most heavily? These are operational questions as much as IT ones, and the answers should drive configuration decisions.

 

Connectivity is a good example of the importance of understanding where a mobile-enabled role will be using the new device. If it’s a clinician who works exclusively in a hospital at the patient bedside, the organisation doesn’t need to waste money on a cellular connection, provided the building Wi-Fi is reliable and has proven to meet the uptime requirements.

 

This understanding is important for keeping devices safe too. Mission-critical devices with a high level of connectivity will need stricter management and monitoring compared to those with limited functionality.

 

Update schedules work the same way. For example, retail businesses typically need to go into an effective code freeze from November through to mid-January. You don’t want updates to critical POS devices during peak trading season in case there’s an issue that takes them offline. A mobile strategy that ignores operational reality will create friction at exactly the wrong moment.

 

 

Getting IT across the line

There is another obstacle to good mobile integration that does not get enough attention, and it lives within the IT department itself.

 

Despite mobile having been a critical asset for many years now, IT instincts are still often built around desktop environments. These are typically more stable and slow-moving than the mobile world. There’s usually time to test any changes before they really hit the live environment, and a bit of version lag is seen as fairly harmless anyway.

 

By contrast, mobile operating systems move faster, update more frequently and irregularly, and there’s an assumption within the business that updates are being applied at a reasonable cadence.  Our research found that more than half of organisations have at least one device with a critically out-of-date operating system, leaving it dangerously exposed to cyber threats. Copy-pasting a Windows-centric strategy - one where numerous overlapping agents are running on a device to maintain compliance with enterprise policies - to your mobile fleet will introduce far more risks, not to mention negative impacts on the user experience, than many realise.

 

This is compounded by the fact that security and digital workplace teams frequently operate in silos. The former is focused on threat and compliance, the latter on keeping people productive. Those goals can easily go hand in hand, but there’s often a lot of miscommunication and friction.

 

For example, I often see an issue where security tasks are ‘sandbagged’, getting batched up and delivered to the mobility team in one info monthly dump, by which point the window for a timely response has often already closed. Yet another sign that mobile devices are not treated as first-class citizens in the IT landscape, despite many roles now relying exclusively on a mobile device to perform work.

 

Overcoming these kinds of issues requires giving teams the visibility and tooling to apply their judgment on mobile’s own terms, rather than through a lens built for a different era.

 

 

What good mobile looks like

Done well, workflow-driven mobile integration transforms devices from managed endpoints into active contributors, feeding operational insight back to the business, reducing manual overhead, and giving IT confidence that what they are managing reflects reality.

 

Visibility is the most essential ingredient to making this possible. Understanding which applications are in use, by whom, and when informs everything from workforce planning to connectivity investment to app rationalisation. The organisations leading on mobile treat that data as a strategic asset, not a byproduct of device management.

 

People also engage more willingly with technology that respects the full shape of their working day, including the parts that are not strictly job-related. Say you have the flexibility to manage devices and also allow a baggage handler to stream something on a break, or a trader to check personal messages between calls. That leads to a happier workforce that is more likely to engage with the devices for work too. Locking everything down can undermine the adoption that makes the investment worthwhile.

 

Mobile has long since graduated from a convenience to a cornerstone of how businesses operate. While most organisations have accepted that, fewer have acted on what it actually requires. The companies extracting real value from their mobile investments are not necessarily the ones with the biggest fleets; they are the ones who asked the right questions before the devices were even unboxed, and kept asking them afterwards.

 

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Michael Covington is VP of Strategy at Jamf

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Cicy