The ability to work from your smartphone, anywhere and anytime, has transformed the way business is conducted, writes Nader Henein, regional director: advanced security division at BlackBerry.
But while most organisations have embraced the ability to be mobile, many are not taking full advantage of the opportunities mobility represents because they do not recognise the real value that going mobile can offer beyond the obvious benefits.
For most businesses and governments in the Middle East the extent of enterprise mobility is reached when they’ve setup an employee’s email account on their smartphone. From a purely commercial perspective, you’ve deployed a mobile device management platform, purchased licenses and in many cases bought a device and a new mobile subscription, so you’ve spent quite a bit to get email on the go.
Don’t get me wrong, being able to stay on top of corporate mail while out of the office is critical for employees to be to be productive and efficient, but shouldn’t corporations get more for all that spend?
In short, the answer is yes. Corporations should get a better return for their investment. However, ROI is linked to the mobile maturity of a business. The more advanced a business is in their enterprise mobility strategy, the higher the value and the ROI will be.
One small step
Moving beyond basic enterprise mobility management (EMM) and messaging is a small step with large gains. It sounds as if it should happen organically but there is often a tendency with corporations that after they have deployed a product and it has reached stability, they then leave it alone. That essentially means that have not maximised their ROI.
Maturing from EMM and Messaging to Collaboration involves extending your corporate instant messaging capabilities to mobile devices, whether they’re with CISCO Jabber, Skype for Business (formerly Microsoft Lync) or otherwise. In many cases all this involves is pushing the correct App to your managed devices and configuring user access. Collaboration also involves document sharing. This is a fairly trivial step yet it has huge potential; email is great, but we need access to our corporate documents securely on the move whether they sit in shared network drives, Microsoft SharePoint or the cloud.
For example with the multi-OS platform BES12, this is a question of a few clicks either via Good Share or WatchDox by BlackBerry.
When you wake up tomorrow morning and reach out to your phone remember how important mobility has become in your day to day life. Then ask yourself – has it brought the same transformation to my work? If the answer is no, then there is substantial room for increased productivity and revenue with just a few clicks.