Crafting a Mobility Strategy

Background and Opportunity

Few trends have shaped the nature of how we work more than the expansion of mobile computing.

For years, the power user in Seat 5A circumnavigated the globe delivering keynotes, closing deals, and meeting customers in hotel lobbies and airport lounges. These frequent flyer rock-stars demanded to be un-tethered from the tower PC’s that adorned corporate America, and to be given smaller and smaller laptops connected to corporate resources back home. And then came the Blackberry.

Those of a certain age all have a story about how a Blackberry saved a deal, helped them get to a meeting, or earned them a “talking to” by a family member for using the “crack-berry” at dinner. The Blackberry has evolved to a smartphone powered by iOS or Android, and its cousin, the tablet.

Mobility continues to revolutionize how we spend our time both in the office and at home. But one thing is certain – the way we work and the expectations around access to our private time will never be the same.

This shift has allowed corporations to

· Reduce real estate costs

· Decrease capital expense on device ownership through BYOD

· Improve productivity

· Move many aspects of company operations closer to the customer

Users have benefited from

· Less time spent commuting

· Flexible working hours

· The ability to be productive on their own terms

Getting Started

Recognize the drivers. Drivers for mobility adoptions run the gamut. Topping the list are demands from employees who have discovered—via consumer devices and applications—a new level of productivity and collaboration empowered by mobility. Complementing that driver is a pending class of employees: new college graduates that were raised on the Internet have superior mobility skills and expect premium technology tools. The need to empower employees in a way that drives agility, flexibility, and productivity while also lowering expenses such as office real estate and (potentially) IT hardware costs has reset the priorities of many CIOs.

Further fueling the desire to formalize mobility initiatives is the shift of power in business from IT departments to end users who now navigate easily around the policies and standards of traditional IT environments by self-provisioning computing power and applications. Additionally, many corporations are forward-focused on leveraging mobility and social media to interact with consumers, further cementing their desire to address this technology trend proactively.

Understand the impact of trends. To be well positioned for this trend, a VAR must be prepared to educate customers—from SMB to the enterprise—about the trends of consumerization and BYOD. VAR’s must communicate the potential influence of both trends on business operations in terms of employee productivity and collaboration, business expenses and profitability, and corporate agility and competitiveness. Succinctly articulating to customers the disruptive nature of mobility—fueled by cloud technology innovations—is imperative when discussing a requisite mobility strategy. From there, the value proposition for VAR’s revolves around the construction of a thorough, well-considered plan for managing, securing, and effectively utilizing those devices.

What trends have most impacted your customers?

Understand your Customer’s Pain Points. Just as users struggled to manage systems in the transition from mainframe to distributed computing, and to handle the sprawl created by the networks linking all those systems together, so too must users tackle the challenge of managing mobile computing.

Management costs are both difficult to control and justify since they are often not directly associated with the “benefits” of the computing platforms they monitor. Reduction of cost and risk avoidance, are often how these projects get sold. It’s critical to understand these pain points and translate them as much as possible to positive benefits that meet needs.

Examples of most frequent pain points:

· Increased time and cost managing a large and growing inventory of mobile devices

· Disparate OS platforms and mobile device types

· Time consuming mobile policy development and management

· Managing multiple profiles and user types

· Data loss due to device loss

· Asset loss due to poor management

· Network security access

· Employee turnover

What pain points do your customers tell you about?

· Reach out to existing customers and discuss how they struggle with managing mobile devices and what they are looking for from a solution. Explore challenges and solutions they have implemented in the networking and distributed computing space to illicit the benefits of management platforms.

· Model this approach with your own company. Talk to your IT department and determine what might appeal to an SMB customer.

Consider the interdependencies. Elements of a solid VAR strategy for delivering on that turnkey mobility plan range from end-to-end assessment and auditing of the network and devices to highly customized value-adds such as business application development or creation of native apps housed within the corporate infrastructure. Additionally, mobility often impacts far beyond the handheld device, creating havoc with security, infrastructure, voice applications, compliance, human resources and more. Thus, to succeed, VAR’s must consider the interdependencies of each element as part of the overall environment in order to avoid costly mistakes and failures.

What interdependencies do you foresee?

Evaluate your current expertise and resources. A VAR should evaluate its current capabilities before considering the best path to gaining expertise around each of those components, which can include investments in training, hiring, vendor relationships, software evaluation and testing, and sales. For those managed services providers that streamline processes through remote monitoring and management tools, as well as business operations automation products, determining what level of support for mobility is available through your existing partnerships will also be key. Lastly, VAR’s face the daunting task of staying current with vendors in the mobility market, as well as their products, operating systems, and hardware/firmware roadmaps.

Other internal evaluations faced by VAR’s keen on tackling mobility opportunities should include mobile help desk and support services readiness levels. While some solutions providers staff for basic 8 to 5 support, they are not prepared for 24x7 mobile-centric technology support. Since a significant driver behind mobility is productivity and access for mobile workers, round-the-clock support will be vital—and a rich opportunity for IT services providers.

Outside of the technology aspects of mobility, VAR’s must cultivate workflow and human resource expertise since mobility can impact—positively and negatively—the commonplace operations of a given organization. While mobility can deliver time and productivity advantages, it can also streamline work processes while encouraging and enhancing collaboration and automation. All of those advantages can greatly impact end users, an often-overlooked constituency when a business is constructing its mobile strategy. VAR’s must be ready to offer guidance around building employee support for new mobility policies that may or may not change standard operating procedures for end users, especially those who may have been applying mobile technology in the business setting but outside the purview of IT management.

For many VAR’s, building the arsenal of skills needed to holistically address mobility strategies with customers can mean hiring outside the technology arena. It is possible that enterprise customers will demand experienced advice on technology—network infrastructure, mobile devices, operating systems, security, data loss protection, business continuity, etc.—but also on expense, vendor and device management, human resources, compliance, and business intelligence.

To fully reap the benefits of developing a mobile strategy business offering, VAR’s should consider partnering for that expertise rather than identifying and hiring in-house talent. That approach enables faster maturation of a provider’s offering and enhances scalability. Additionally, with mobility becoming essential for so many customers, the VAR’s that develop and can articulate a clear mobility expertise will be able to market that value as a differentiator in an increasingly crowded IT marketplace.

Examine your sales and marketing strategies. Lastly, as VAR’s consider the adjustments to their business that a mobility focus may demand, they should honestly evaluate their sales and marketing capabilities. Because of the broad-reaching impact of mobility on a business’ IT environment—as well as its employees— VAR’s will discover mobility sales and marketing look and sound extremely consultative. Further driving that approach is the reality that mobility is a strategic and competitive decision with roots in the C-suite of an organization. VAR’s won’t be delivering cookie-cutter mobile plans to customers, but rather they will design distinctive, highly customized business solutions that include technology components. That category of solution doesn’t come with standardized pricing and margins, which may prove a hurdle to some IT businesses.

Creating reasonable—but also profitable—pricing for mobility strategy creation demands a clear-cut plan for launching this initiative as a consultative relationship between VAR and customer. That means approaching this with a proposal-oriented pricing and bundling methodology. A foundational element to successful consultative pricing is a certain understanding of internal costs. IT business owners will need to plan for costs such as researching potential mobility products and best practices on a customer-by-customer basis; investing in the ongoing training and certifications needed to deliver mobile expertise across all of the strategic components within a mobility solution; cultivating ongoing knowledge in a shifting technology landscape; and planning for the financial impact of long sales cycles followed by longer strategic deployments.

Grasping and tracking internal costs for delivering mobility expertise to customers will be essential for right pricing a consultative mobility solution offering. From there, VAR’s may need to consider creative ways to bundle mobility consulting with delivery of the IT components needed to reinforce mobility strategy decisions (i.e. security solutions tailored to support a BYOD environment; MDM customized to reinforce mobility policy across a mobile device fleet). Lastly, VAR’s need to upsell initial engagements by layering on management and services as well as longer term projects such as business application development.

· Challenge your marketing, practice management, and technical teams to dig deep and define concrete benefits to real customers and articulate those messages.

· Consider how you will support the messaging with collateral, thought leadership content (white papers, webinars), and live events such as seminars.

· Work with your marketing team or service providers to best represent the offering on your website.

Steps to a Successful Mobility Strategy

Beyond developing the skilled staff—or partnerships—to address the foundational elements of a mobility strategy, VAR’s must fully grasp the various components of that strategy, up to and including mobile device management (MDM), security, and a comprehensive mobile policy that coordinates technology, human resources, data protection, privacy, and compliance.

Step 1: Evaluate and assess

Just as with any consultative engagement, VAR’s need to launch strategic mobility planning only after gaining full visibility into their customer’s IT environment. A full assessment and audit including both wired and wireless network devices, IT infrastructure, and applications—are required for complete comprehension of where the business stands currently. Many organizations have no real understanding of the type and number of endpoints comprising their environment, and an encompassing plan to replace or enhance those endpoints must be rooted in a full accounting. Adjacent areas to explore include billing audits (who pays what for what) and a management audit (who controls what in terms of devices). Audits of mobile device use often reveal more devices than anticipated, usage that varies significantly, and some devices going under- or un-utilized. Much like the value offered when managed services providers tackle printer fleets, the first deliverable comes with insight into the current situation, which is often unclear to internal stakeholders.

1. Reach out to existing customers and discuss how they struggle with managing mobile devices and what they are looking for from a solution. Explore challenges and solutions they have implemented in the networking and distributed computing space to illicit the benefits of management platforms.

2. Model this approach with your own company. Talk to your IT department and determine what might appeal to an SMB customer.

Step 2: Understand business goals and priorities

While a VAR explores the existing technology landscape, it should also delve into its client’s priorities in terms of growth, innovation, technology adoption, employee enablement, and more. Armed with that knowledge, a consultative provider can better direct that organization’s technology focus toward enabling its goals rather than recommending innovative IT for the sake of its coolness factor. One aspect of this step is discovering current mobility initiatives that may be in progress. Much like the virtualization pilots of the past, mobility initiatives are often pigeonholed by business unit; for example, the sales team may be evaluating mobile options far earlier than the marketing department for productivity and convenience reasons. Understanding the drivers behind those projects—as well as their current standing—can boost future efforts.

Define the solution or use case in high-level terms. The use case definition provides key inputs for marketing collateral and your sales teams’ “elevator pitch.”

Questions to consider:

· What is the solution or use case to be addressed with the technology?

· What are the main benefits of the solution?

· What specific capabilities do you highlight based on your unique customer base?

· What are the advantages of your approach?

Step 3: Consider end users

Unlike many infrastructure-centric technology decisions, an organization’s mobility strategy is typically driven by a desire to better support employees. Research from Strategy Analytics revealed the top driver for mobility in business is improving employee work life (36%), followed by increased revenues and profitability, which you can certainly argue are tied directly to employee productivity and satisfaction. Therefore, experts recommend that end users are included in the fact gathering and testing steps of a mobility solution deployment. Unlike data center or security oriented technology projects, mobility innovations directly impact the end user, and lack of functionality can undermine the best intended plans. When you add to that the potential conflict between BYOD and business policies that impact data on those devices, it is best to encourage consensus and buy-in from the ground up. Additionally, hurdles to effective mobile usage commonly impact end users most heavily, and often in situations where IT support may be lacking. End user frustrations such as irregular connectivity, slow data transfer, application underperformance, and device malfunction must be addressed in a mobile strategy, or user acquiescence levels could suffer.

Draw directly from your vendors’ technology portfolio for diagrams and reference architectures that can be reviewed with potential clients. Provide examples of complete solutions including the required services to help the customer visualize what an end state environment might look like to alleviate the End user frustrations.