Top 5 challenges of Mobile Migration

Making the shift to any mobile business intelligence platform, entails a cohesive mobile strategy and company-wide adoption of mobility. This is a lengthy and methodical process, but it’s well worth the investment. Migrating to a mobile environment can have many cross functional impacts that can leverage your company’s competitive advantage, revenue velocity, efficiency, customer service and more.

In this post, we’ll review a short list of DELL Telecom’s top 5 challenges for an organization migrating to a mobile, or BYOD, environment, so that you can be better suited in facing your company’s mobile migration and contribute to developing a mobile strategy.

1 – Mobile device management: Mobile devices require a new set of tools for activation, asset management, troubleshooting, and retirement. The tools and processes implemented for mobile device management need to be consistent and extensible across multiple mobile OS platforms. Whether managing company or individual owned devices, establishing a set of appropriate processes and policies is as critical as traditional systems management.

2 – Security: Mobile devices introduce new challenges for securing enterprise applications and data. In many cases, a user would prefer to choose and purchase their own device and wireless plan rather than use the device their employer provides. This conflict can ultimately put an organization’s intellectual property and data at risk. Simply strengthening the corporate firewall is no longer an acceptable response. Successful organizations need to provide their employees mobile access to enterprise messaging, calendar, corporate directory systems, database systems and internal workgroups. Rather than saying “no,” enterprises should instead manage the risk associated with the type of data and applications they require, whether the application is designed for connected or offline operation, even if the employee owns the device.

3 – Mobile application architecture and management: Applications are specific to each
mobile OS platform and can be sourced from app stores, via the web or pushed from enterprise IT. Enterprises need tools to build and manage applications that span multiple OS platforms, allowing varying degrees of IT and user control, and choice of which apps can be downloaded. Extending applications to customers can offer new routes to market, as well as enhance the customer experience.

An environment where there is little control of the end user device presents a unique set of applications management challenges. These can be addressed by effective application development and testing. In cases where multiple applications will be made available, a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform may prove to be the right solution.

4 – Wireless cost and carrier management: Expanding the mobile user community in an enterprise drives increased cost for wireless voice and data plans. To keep these costs down, enterprises should consider tools that assign users to specific voice/data plans based on their role within the organization and provide real-time controls to manage roaming.

5 – IT cost management: Adding more enterprise mobile devices creates new demands on mobile device procurement, activation, IT support and the help desk. The extra burden on these groups can lead to an increase in cost. To mitigate this risk, enterprises need flexible deployment capabilities to control how new expertise, headcount, and operating cost are incurred for mobile devices.

Excerpt as seen in DELL’s Enterprise Mobility Solutions Whitepaper.