As we talk to more and more customers and partners about mobility management, we have indentified three primary management imperatives that mobility managers must address to meet the demanding world of mobility in today’s enterprise: transform, maintain, respond.

Transform

Transform refers to the process of migrating from current state to a desired state.  Most companies are not happy with their current state for a variety of reasons and are looking to transform to a new operational state.  For example, a company may be currently supporting dozens of mobility devices from multiple carriers.  To save money and improve technical support, the company decides to standardize on three devices from two carriers over the next 6 months.     Or a company currently has a one-size fits all mobility policy and seeks to segment its mobile workforce into groups based on unique mobile needs (salesforce, executive, international travelers, and more).   Key elements of transform:

• Visibility into current state at summary and detail level
• Ability to define and capture furture state
• Processes and task to facilitate the transformation
• Monitor the transformation process on a periodic basis

Maintain

Maintain is the management need to provide ongoing service and support for mobility.   Dozens of tasks that need to be performed on a daily, weekly and monthly basis in mobility including supporting new hires, de-provisioning exiting employees, new devices, lost devices, plan changes, processing invoices, end user support and more.  The key to maintaining this dynamic environment is centralization of people, devices, plans and monthly spend into a common system.   Key elements of maintain:

• Metrics and monitors of key performance indicators
• Collaborative communication with end users and business managers
• Processes and tasks to facilitate the maintenance activities 
• End-user service and support

Respond

Respond refers to the ability of the Mobility Manager to respond to ad-hoc request from executives and others.   The ability to quickly answer questions like:  What carrier do we spend the most with and how much do we spend? How many people in the company have a BlackBerry or other smart phone?   How many people in the company have more than one device?   How many different devices do we support?   Having a centralized system that can answer these questions and more is an essential dimension of mobility excellence.  Key elements of Respond:

• One system that pulls people, device and carrier data into a unified information architecture
• An ad-hoc reporting capability with filtering and sorting
• Metrics and Monitors that can be fed to executives and other interested stakeholders

While managing mobility promises to get more complex and demanding, most activities and tasks fall into these three management imperatives?   What other management dimensions are you addressing as the mobility manager?  What is the most difficult?

Tags: Managing Mobility

This entry was posted by by Dean Alms on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 11:42 am and is filed under Dean Alms, Enterprise, Mobility. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.