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With a solid strategy you will mobilise your organisation effectively, says 3fifteen

Mobilising the incorrect parts of the South African enterprise is a needless expense, says Grant Selvan, sales and business development executive at 3fifteen.


Johannesburg, 16 Aug 2013

Enterprise mobility continues to grow as a trend, with pressure mounting to develop sound strategies that deliver on the promise of improved productivity, efficiency and time to market.

The risk associated with this, however, is that without the correct mobile strategy, organisations are potentially wasting millions in developing mobile apps that do not support their business requirements. This is the view of Grant Selvan, sales and business development executive at 3fifteen.

"People are fundamentally changing the way they work," says Grant. "Mobile technologies are also revolutionising the way we work and play, and individual preferences are now forcing enterprises to adapt and implement new ways of managing their networks and data." However, without a solid mobile strategy in place, companies could be developing apps that are not critical to operations and are therefore not used.

As with most trends, mobility solutions must be tailored to meet specific business requirements in order for them to be of value to the organisation. "Companies that have tried and failed at mobility have blamed their failure on not having the right device or network," says Grant. "Then they go and compound their failure by buying more devices and trying the latest, greatest network offering without taking a look at the real truths as to why their projects keep failing."

Having the wrong mobile strategy often means companies depend on the marketplace to guide them on how to run their business in a mobile environment, instead of creating an assessment of how their business works, which parts of their business can become mobile and which parts should not be mobilised. This dilutes the benefits in implementing a mobile strategy and results in unnecessary costs.

A well-developed mobility solution should include consulting to determine requirements and gaps, management, application development based on a comprehensive needs analysis, and system integration. "Each of these components is equally important in creating a mobility solution that is tailored to meet the company's needs."

Mobile is how people work in the post-PC era, but this shift introduces risk, cost, and usability challenges that traditional IT strategies cannot address. These challenges include protecting data, mobilising apps and documents, preserving the user experience and privacy and supporting a constantly shifting mobile operating system and device landscape. All of this needs to be taken into account, while allowing for deployment, often at a massive scale, to end-users across organisations. "This is referred to as mobile IT and it expands the definitions of both mobile device management and mobile app management. Mobile IT requires new strategies, skills, and platforms because it is user-led, cross-functional, and operates at consumer speed," Grant adds.

One of the biggest concerns companies raise with regards to mobility is the impact on legacy systems. "Many companies fear that they would need to completely overhaul their legacy systems, resulting in massive financial commitments," says Grant. "This ties in directly with the need to ascertain whether end-users require access to those systems in question and to then integrate with those systems to mobilise them into a rich, multi-platform experience for the organisation." A good integration layer is critical to success in the mobile environment. Companies can also leverage their Web sites or individual system components to speed up the mobile application development process.

Grant adds that you cannot simply build mobile applications for the organisation for the sake of building an application. "Where mobile application or mobilised integration portals makes sense, we lead with industry experts to deliver a holistic mobile application and integration strategy, followed by a beautiful fully functioning application solution," he concludes.

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