Long gone are the days when your team was tethered to the office, relying on filing cabinets and fax machines to get the job done.
Today, mobile devices allow your people to work anytime, and from virtually anywhere, improving business efficiency, productivity, teamwork, collaboration and the speed of business. But going mobile in your business also presents some enterprise mobility management challenges.
Without strong systems and processes in place, managing your mobile workforce can be very demanding. And going mobile can lead to an increase information and privacy security risks.
Tools to improve enterprise mobility management
The good news is there are plenty of tools available for optimising enterprise mobility management. So, to help you keep your people and your mobile fleet working efficiently and effectively while ensuring your company data is secure, read on for our top three enterprise mobility management tips:
2. Understand Your Mobile Costs
Tip #1 – Know What’s Going On
When you’re managing a fleet of mobile devices, things can get out of hand. Knowing who has which device, and what they’re doing with it, can be impossible to keep up with. Add to this the pressures of other tasks like keeping systems working, managing budgets and planning future technology projects, and it’s easy to loosen your grip on enterprise mobility management.
Mobile device management (MDM) is a strong first step to enabling visibility and control. MDM gives you visibility over your entire fleet of mobile devices from a central management console and dashboard, helping you see and manage what is going on across the mobile fleet.
For example, say you have a fleet of 100 company-owned mobiles, 30 BYOD mobiles and 50 tablets. An MDM platform will provide control over areas such as access to sensitive corporate information by managing user privileges, usage and security settings.
MDM platforms also help you boost active compliance to enterprise mobility policies by both the device and user, and provide passive reporting of activity.
Other useful functionality includes remote activation and deactivation of devices, management of network access and authentication into your corporate infrastructure.
MDM is usually managed with a dashboard overview of the fleet, which saves your IT team time and money, not to mention the added benefit of making their job easier.
Tip #2 – Understand Your Mobile Costs
The costs involved in purchasing and running your mobile devices can add up fast. So, it’s important to track where your money is going, and also identify the areas where savings can be found.
A Telecom Expense Management (TEM) solution makes easy work of this by providing detailed information about mobile plan and data usage. This includes analysis that provides useful insights to help you set policies, profiles, launch investigations and reconciliations.
TEM systems produce monthly spend reports based on the end user, business unit or organisation, with detailed breakdowns on how your mobile devices are being used. This allows you to compare your current plan with your actual use, to make sure you’re only paying for services that you need.
For cost transparency, your bill breakdowns can be sent to managers and end users, shifting the monitoring of services down to managers and away from IT, improving accountability for both your employees and company departments and can also help prevent unexpected “bill shock”.
Tip #3 – Be App Smart
Apps are useful in business, but if your employees install third party apps to the mobile devices they are using for work, they have the potential to wreak havoc. This includes security implications exposing your company data to potential breaches, device stability issues, and interoperability problems with other systems in external organisations.
To safeguard your organisation’s information, active compliance monitoring and policy enforcement are strongly recommended. This may involve:
- ‘White-listing’ approved apps
- ‘Black-listing’ barred apps
- Instigating a form of app pre-qualification prior to installation to make sure non-standard apps do not create issues.
These steps all form part of Mobile Application Management (MAM) which can cover both company-owned as well as BYOD devices, and is a key component of enterprise mobility management.
Create a well-defined enterprise mobility management strategy
To help your organisation get the most from mobile communications, make sure your enterprise mobility management strategy centres around:
- Improved efficiency and user accountability
- Strong security measures
- Centralised management and reporting.
If you need help managing your mobile fleet, please get in touch. imei has close to 20 years’ experience in managing mobile communications and can give you peace of mind that your mobile fleet is operating at optimal levels, while you free your internal team to focus on their strengths. Call us on 1300 65 77 99 or email us here.
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