9 Simple Steps To A Winning Enterprise Mobile Strategy

From ‘we too need an app’ to ‘mobile as a strategy’ and ‘optimize mobility benefits’ enterprise mobility has travelled lot of distance. Today, mobile technology is at the heart of every business strategy fueling innovation, new efficiency gains and driving profits and customer satisfaction. A robust enterprise mobile strategy has become essential for enterprises. A comprehensive strategy offers numerous benefits such as:

• Leveraging your existing enterprise technology like ERP, CRM, etc., and integrating the existing IT infrastructure to derive optimum results.
• Improving adoption rates by focusing on user-centricity.
• Enabling enterprise-wide adoption—connecting people, products and processes.
• Maximizing productivity by speeding up responsiveness to employee needs and process requirements.
• Making the organization more agile and responsive to customer needs and, thereby, boosting brand perception.
• Maximizing results and returns from investments on mobility solutions by widening its scope and coverage.
• Allowing businesses to create sustainable and clear policies for mobile governance.

But where to begin? Here are 9 simple steps to a winning mobile strategy

1. Define Business Goals

State the purpose of enabling mobility in your enterprise. What are your high-priority business goals? What type of apps will help you reach those goals? Look outside, as well as, within your organization, to identify opportunities for mobile.

2. Prepare Mobility Roadmap

Once you have a set of business goals that you wish to achieve through mobility, the next step is to find the desired mobile devices and apps that will help you reach those goals. For each mobile solution, you need to build a case summary that lists key benefits, functions, target users and target beneficiaries, etc. Prioritizing these mobile solutions based on your set business goals will evolve into a mobility roadmap.

3. Do user Workflow analysis

Any mobility solution will replace an existing workflow process. Therefore, it is important to do a comprehensive analysis of the existing process before it is mobilized. This will not only help you improve the existing process, but will also help you measure the impact of mobilizing the particular process and justify the costs.

4. Prepare a Technology Blueprint

Designing a technology blueprint has several facets, including deciding on a mobile platform, OS and device selection, device procurement strategy—company sponsored or BYOD— core mobility architecture, mobile app development strategy, security policy, app and device management strategy and wireless connectivity requirements, etc.



5. Set a Budget for Mobility

Many organizations make the mistake of combining a mobile budget with IT, which often results in confusion and, at times, pushes mobile investments down the priority ladder. You need to create a separate budget for your mobility efforts. What are you planning to invest today, in the next six months and in the next few years? Breaking up the budget for processes, departments, etc., will enable you to build an accurate ROI model.

6. Draw an Implementation Roadmap

The mobile implementation roadmap will allow you to assess the current state of mobility in the organization, to compare it against the business goals, and to set up the timeframe and work process to realize it. Since an implementation roadmap requires the identification of risks and dependencies and the entry and exit criteria of each mobile project to be well defined, it can help you to monitor and manage each project effectively to achieve the overall strategic goals on time.

7. Build a Center of Excellence

Mobility serves the requirements of various stakeholders in the system. To accomplish this, build a Center of Excellence with people from diverse domains and expertise to unify and centralize the many voices.. The COE will institutionalize best practices for mobility, bring consistency to the integration process, define policy and procedures for use and access of mobile solutions and look for opportunities for further adoption of mobile initiatives, etc.

8. Do Test Deployment

Pick a particular process or mobile opportunity to test your mobility plan. Implement it and see how it turns out. Analyze and document the deployment to understand success and failure points. Fine-tune your mobile strategy based on the test deployment experiences. Then, expand it to an organization-wide rollout.

9. Monitor, Evaluate and Review

It is important to constantly monitor and assess your strategy based on the feedback collected from various sources. Any deviation has to be immediately corrected. There should be a calendar for the review process for each element of your mobile environment.

The key to success in enterprise mobility is to adopt mobile devices and apps within a well-defined strategy, integrating processes, products and people to optimize the benefits. The goal should be to derive optimum value by creating a collaborative, secure and scalable mobile environment. In your journey to mobilize your enterprise, the keywords to remember are strategy, synergy, security and user-centricity.

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Tags: Enterprise mobile strategy