Enterprise Mobility: What Does it Mean To You As a Business Owner?

Enterprise Mobility is one of the buzzwords doing the rounds in recent times. But what does it mean to you as a business owner and how important is it for you? Or is it really a matter of conce at all? Let’s start by looking at some closed-ended questions: 1. Does your business need to leverage the large, growing, young population of India which is highly mobile savvy? 2. Do you want to grow your revenues by being at the right place at the right time? 3. Do you want better productivity from your employees but also give them more flexibility and a better work environment at the same time? 4. Is real time data analysis and collaboration important to your business? 5. Would you like to give a better experience to your customers and vendors/partners? If you don’t have at least one answer as ‘Yes’ then please stop here. Enterprise Mobility is not for you. You don’t have to waste your precious time reading any further! But for most businessmen, the answer would be an emphatic ‘Yes’ for most of the above questions, if not all. If you are also one of them then please read on… What is Enterprise Mobility? Enterprise mobility can be defined as a channel for distributing information through mobile devices. It facilitates communication with employees, suppliers, partners, vendors and even the customers irrespective of their geo location. According to another interesting definition, Enterprise mobility refers to a shift in work habits, with more employees working out of office and using mobile devices and cloud services to perform the business tasks on the go. Emerging Trends Mobility is becoming an integral part of any enterprise. Integrating business devices with messaging, email, voice, intranet and internet is the new norm. Enterprise applications can be run from anywhere on the mobile devices. There is an increase in complexity of the devices and platforms. There is also a paradigm shift as more and more mobile app development are being hosted on the cloud. Benefits of Enterprise Mobility – Real time data analysis – Better resource allocation – Effective partner participation – Improved employee productivity – Better work environment – Real time collaboration – Cuts admin cost and time – Business Growth & Opportunity – Anywhere, Anytime! Challenges of Enterprise Mobility While a lot has been talked about the potential and benefits of Enterprise Mobility, it does come with a few challenges as well. If critical IT systems which are extended to mobile platforms fail for some reason then the turnaround times can increase. This might affect the service levels and revenue forecasts. Another caution factor is that if the mobile architecture is not built properly then it would require manual intervention for maintenance, thereby increasing the effort, time and cost involved. Having said that, the benefits outweigh the risks by a huge margin. Hence, Enterprise Mobility is the way to go if you want to remain competitive in this dynamic and fast moving business ecospace.