This blog courtesy of: Anthony Tate, Senior Product Marketing Manager EMEA
Digital technologies have enormous potential to transform how enterprises create revenue and positive outcomes by fostering innovative strategies, products, processes and experiences. But to what degree do businesses recognise this – and are they mobilising their forces sufficiently, in order to exploit those potential benefits?
According to research from Accenture – ‘Mobility: Fueling the Digital Surge’– those forces are now very much on the march. In its findings, of the major digital technologies—including mobility, social media, big data analytics, the cloud and connected products—mobility has risen to the top, in terms of importance to organisations. Some 77% of participants in a survey carried out by Accenture considered mobility among their top five priorities for the coming year, while 43% said the technology was in their top two.
This knowledge added a great deal of edge and intrigue to the recent ‘Guardian & Symantec Future of Mobility’ event, where speakers from Accenture, Army HQ and Symantec offered their take on the rapid inroads mobility is making to IT strategies.
Sanjeev Skukla, cyber security consulting director, Accenture, focused on defining the current state of mobility, mainly with reference to his company’s report. Although the majority of C-level survey respondents do rank mobility as a top five priority, there are challenges to be overcome, including low demonstrable ROI (only 10% are seeing any ROI), lack of metrics assigned at the beginning of projects and the struggle to keep pace with rapid technology developments.
Also holding enterprises back from embracing mobility, as Skukla highlighted, is that people involved in strategy are either business people OR technical, but no one is in the middle, combining the two.
ARMY CHALLENGES
Craig Collins, innovation and systems development architect, Army HQ, pointed out that the Army often thinks of itself as ‘different’, but in reality it operates similarly to corporations and faces similar challenges (excluding ROI, where their measurable is lives and not money). When the Army began to develop its mobility strategy 3-4 years ago, key drivers were:
- Low budgets
- Organisational restructures
- Cloud adoption
- Efficiencies
- And wanting to be seen as the “responsive Army at home”.
Challenges faced, he added, include security levels (particularly around classified information), slow policy changes internally, change fatigue with all the restructuring, and changes in procurement attitudes - they’re used to buying tanks, not IT!
Their main mobility goal is to get information as quickly as possible to the heart of the Army. By using mobile technology, the Land Accident Investigation Team can cut the time for their field reports to be sent to base from 30 to five days, potentially fixing problems and saving lives faster. There are employee productivity benefits to be gained at Sandhurst where Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) access and improving connectivity for officers and means staff are more likely to maintain their phones as they are more valuable to them, allowing them to contact family. In the Defence Gateway they created a VLE to inform staff and dependents of all latest updates, and they installed secure WiFi at the Land Warfare School, despite Army not being generally receptive to WiFi for security reasons.
Collins concluded with the fact that mobility is an enabler, has great business benefits, but needs continued investment and to be constantly agile.
‘MUST HAVES’ & ‘MUST KNOWS’
Given the fact that mobility is simply “the new normal”, and also the future breeding ground of malware and security threats, these are Symantec’s ‘Must Haves’ for Mobility:
- Understand business needs and problems
- Understand business tools, devices & apps now and in the future
- Conduct a user trial, analyse the results and don’t be afraid to re-think your strategy
We see four different approaches to mobility: COBO (corporate owned, business use only), COPE (corporate owned, personally enabled), CYOD (choose your own device), BYOD (bring your own device). The reality is that an organisation tends to adopt a mixture of approaches so its key that you have an understanding of your strategy before even looking a technical solution.
Research and our own experience shows that 51% of 21–32 year olds would go against a policy banning them from using personal phones – indicating how the march of mobility is relentless.
When it comes to a winning mobility strategy, we’re often asked what it looks like? It’s my belief that it should include the following:
- The right team (to act as advocates and provide input)
- Deliberate decisions on device access (what exactly people can see/do)
- New policies for personal devices
- Legal considerations taken into account
- Advanced mobile security technology
- The best strategy for each business unit – this isn’t a ‘one size fits all’ approach.
In addition it’s important to consider the 5 ‘Must Haves’ for an Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solution:
- Device management (a basic requirement but still the foundation for many mobile security strategies)
- Application management (policies for each app, app wrapping capabilities and an enterprise app store)
- Threat protection (A growing concern, the threat landscape is rapidly changing. Android is the main source of culprit with over 3,262 new variants of malware last year according to Symantec Internet Security Threat Report Volume 19)
- Content management (secure sync n share, data loss prevention, content push to devices)
- ID & access control (including two-factor authentication, Single sign-on (SSO) across mobile applications and CA integration).
As Accenture points out in its ‘Mobility: Fueling the Digital Surge’ report: “Mobile, cloud, social media and analytics have given birth to an age where technology has become the foundation of any successful business—a prime driver of market differentiation, business growth, innovation, adaptability, collaboration and profitability. In short, every business is now a digital business, and the C-level executives who understand the benefits of digital are those that are likely to be most successful.”
The main challenges facing enterprises in the drive towards a mobile future is the need for a greater understanding of what it can deliver and a commitment to budget for it properly. Without this, it is difficult for the board to take mobility seriously.
Image created by: Scriberia