Reforming your mobility strategy: Where does your organisation fall on the mobile maturity curve?
The four stages of the mobile maturity curve.
Mobility is a journey, and to begin, it’s useful to understand where your organisation falls on the mobile maturity curve. This will help ensure that the solution you choose meets your needs. In BlackBerry’s whitepaper – The CIO’s Guide to EMM – 10 critical decision points, they explore this theme identifying four general stages to the mobile maturity curve.
As your business accelerates along the curve, your mobile approach will become gradually more transformative as you adopt new strategies, incorporate new tools, modify existing business processes, and eventually create entirely new business models. At the same time, security requirements increase as more and more corporate applications become mobilised.
Stage One: Basic Mobility (MDM, Email, & Messaging)
The first investments an organisation typically makes into mobility are mobile device management (MDM) and email. At this point, most enterprises understand that mobility is critical to their business objectives, but they aren’t sure how to tap into it – they lack the tools and expertise to do so.
Moving past basic mobility requires that you:
- Implement an enterprise mobility management (EMM) solution that lets you secure and control both devices and content.
- Begin researching mobile security best practices and developing in-house mobile expertise.
- Acquire knowledge of how mobile devices are used within your business.
- Build on that knowledge to think about how mobile devices could be used – how might departments collaborate more effectively through mobility?
Stage Two: Mobile Collaboration
Once your users have got a taste of mobile email and messaging, they’ll naturally want to start doing more with their phones. They’ll demand business applications that help them work and collaborate more efficiently. Should you fail to deliver what they require, they’ll seek their own solutions.
The biggest threat at this stage is data leakage, as employees share sensitive files through both first- and third-party apps (often carelessly). User privacy is also an issue, with personal devices being used more and more frequently in the workplace.
There are three key challenges here:
- Ensuring the applications your employees rely on will work with their mobile devices.
- Implementing a document control solution that allows you to protect sensitive files against mishandling.
- Looking beyond company-wide collaboration to think about how mobility slots into key business processes – for example, a sales department’s CRM platform or a hospital’s communications system.
Stage Three: Mobilisation of Existing Business Processes
In stage three, you’ve moved beyond simple collaboration, and there’s a push for mobile apps and initiatives to improve the operations of specific departments. IT, meanwhile, has begun identifying efficiency bottlenecks that could be solved with mobile apps. You may also be looking into internal application development.
The hurdles you’ll face in stage three include:
- Storing, managing and securing the new forms of data that emerge as a result of mobilisation.
- Protecting business-critical files and data from criminals and unscrupulous competitors by ensuring mobile employees have a secure means of accessing corporate systems/records.
- Incorporating mobile applications into existing infrastructure.
- Ensuring your mobility initiatives keep with both security regulations and your own security baselines.
Stage Four: Creation of New Business Processes
By now, you’re re-engineering your business around mobility. New revenue streams have begun to emerge, and you’re constantly seeking ways to further improve existing business processes, lowering costs, improving efficiency, and heightening customer satisfaction. An example of this in practice can be seen with Canadian insurance firm Northbridge Financial, which equips its claims professionals with the Encircle platform to better enable them in the field.
Mobility at this stage is pervasive. Mobile devices have become so widespread that managing them individually is inefficient, and your business is flooded by hundreds of different applications – including custom, internal apps. Corporate data, meanwhile, is everywhere.
To ensure you reap all the benefits of mobile maturity, there are a few goals you must accomplish:
- Set up a platform that enables your business to quickly and securely build and deploy any apps it requires without having to reinvent the wheel.
- Implement file-centric digital rights management (DRM) that gives you complete control over sensitive documents.
- Shift from device-centric to user-centric authentication through an identity and access management solution, with single sign-on authentication for mobile apps.
To learn more about where you are on your mobility journey and the solutions that will support your enterprise, download the white paper
