Enterprise mobility has become essential and every organisation needs to expand all aspects of mobility to improve their customer relations and service.
So says Sergio Congia, manager for SAP Digital at Deloitte, who points out South African organisations are on par with overseas companies with regards to adopting enterprise mobility strategies.
On this note, Deloitte, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online Enterprise Mobility Survey during October to determine the maturity of an organisation's attitude towards enterprise mobility.
"Our position on the benefits of having an enterprise mobility strategy in place, from an SAP Digital perspective, is we have observed recurring customer pain points in this regard. These include unclear ownership structures; insufficient governance; uncertainty with regard to both policy and regulatory compliance; as well as difficulty justifying a business case for investment," Congia says.
He adds many organisations will make a technology decision to purchase, for example, a mobile device management (MDM) product, without first defining the appropriate internal ownership structures; ie should the product fall under the SAP team, networks team, infrastructure team, or even within business?
Ideally, he explains, this should be a combination of all, which should form part of a Centre of Excellence. "The same applies to mobile apps. Organisations tend to commission the building of one, two or even three apps, each with their own security, authentication, infrastructure and logging mechanisms.
"If an organisation supports multiple apps or an app on multiple device types, then a mobile platform should most certainly be considered as a means to centralise these mechanisms; and even offer advanced capabilities such as offline synchronisation and user locking."
Congia is of the view that governance with regard to HR contracts addressing BYOD and use of personal devices within an organisation should also be taken into consideration as there are many risks such as customer information residing on a personal device should it get lost.
He also warns that without the appropriate skills within an organisation, enterprise mobility technology risks being shelved and the costs being written off or, even worse, exposing your organisation to risk.
"There is also reputational and financial risk should a device containing customer data be compromised. Revenue loss can occur should an inadequate mobile infrastructure be deployed without appropriate consideration to high availability and disaster recovery."
According to Congia, there has been a shift in demand to support BYOD/BYOA through mobile application management, which offers granular policies to specific apps rather than total device control offered by MDM. There is also a trend of these and other enterprise mobility solutions being offered in the cloud, he notes.
"Furthermore, from an infrastructure cost perspective, customers are opening up to support these hosted/cloud offerings of mobility solutions as opposed to an on-premise deployment that generally necessitates complex network setups and additional hardware. There has also been an increase for retail and consumer goods customers to provide e-commerce capabilities to business to make their goods/services more accessible to customers and consumers."
He also points out affordability of enterprise mobility infrastructure is becoming an ever-increasing deterrent.
"This is especially true for organisations with investments in large ERP systems such as SAP or Oracle."
When asked if IT trends can drive investment in enterprise mobility, Congia believes drivers differ within organisations, depending on the context.
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