This post is sponsored by Samsung Business. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
Mobile has changed how we live and work, allowing us to engage with our contacts and collateral whenever and wherever we want. Smartphones have led the charge—two thirds of Americans have one, after all—but there’s more to it than that. Mobile has become integrated into some workplace environments that are inherently active—salespeople can place orders on tablets while standing next to customers, physicians can check medical records while sitting next to patients and executives can make deals while traveling at 35,000 feet. Let’s take a look at more ways businesses are capturing the moments in-between with mobile—and how you can get in on the action.
Mobile’s Journey—So Much More Than Smartphones
If I say “mobile,” does your mind automatically go to your smartphone? There’s good reason for that—most Americans check them at least once per hour. If that’s not an indicator of mobile’s permanence, I’m not sure what is. And yes, it’s fantastic to check your email while at lunch or in a cab—if you didn’t have that capability, critical work opportunities would undoubtedly be missed. Any technology that helps you can choose action over distraction is a winner in the business world—smartphones do that, and they do it well.
For a moment, though, try to re-conceptualize the mobile experience into something larger, something with even higher implications for productivity and reach—got it? That’s Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM).
EMM and Your Digital Workplace Strategy
EMM is defined as an “all-encompassing approach to securing and enabling employee use of smartphones and tablets.” There’s more, though—the whole point of EMM is not to simply enable employee use of mobile technology, but to encourage productivity by providing them with the tools they need to do their job wherever and whenever.
There are several acronyms that fall under the EMM umbrella—bring your own device (BYOD), choose your own device (CYOD), bring your own app (BYOA) and develop your own application (DYOA). Today, we’re primarily existing in the BYOD space as manufacturers continue to build security and functionality into personal mobile devices. EMM, though, has touch points in all of the above. Unlike mobile device management (MDM) that controls the device as a whole—something not likely to go over well in today’s BYOD age—EMM tools allow you to manage only the specific mobile and SaaS apps relevant to your business and cover the transport between devices within the corporate network. This strategy allows you to selectively apply policies based on vertical, recoverability, user personas and more.
Those examples I mentioned in the beginning—the doctor, the executive, the salesman—in all those cases, they were doing more than checking emails from mobile devices. They were using tools and applications on their mobile devices to fully perform the tasks at hand. They were beneficiaries of EMMs in action.
When developing your digital workplace strategy, remember to respect the differing geographical, cultural, and economic differences of your user base, bring BYOD into the equation as a given and make sure your IT leaders have enough support to carry out the initiative. Don’t silo your mobile strategy away from your approaches to social, the IoT, cloud or analytics, either—have them work together (with that ever-present eye on keeping your assets secure in the process).
The Takeaway
It’s clear that mobile is more than a way to do business, it’s how we live our lives in today’s digital society. Being armed with a powerful mobile device, though, is only the start of mobility. What are the cultural differences and experiential keys to driving mobility in your enterprise? Especially with the onslaught of millennials in the workforce, the functionality of useful public and private mobile applications makes EMM particularly well suited to positively impact your bottom line. Have you built EMM into your mobile architecture? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.