IT leaders are faced with more demand than ever for mobility services from their employees and to run device driven business applications in certain industries. The new workface dynamics driven by the pandemic have companies providing mobile devices and/or service plans to more workers. The workers need to be able to access and interact with cloud-based applications to perform their jobs; creating escalating costs, cycles of device upgrades and new requirements. On its face, mobility might seem simple to execute with easy access to Apple, Android and Google devices and a seemingly endless flow of “new and improved” service plans from a small universe of carriers.
The reality is quite different. As your device and service inventory grows, the complexity of keeping up with usage, behavior and those ever-changing plans grows with it. Add to this the requirement to service executives with demanding needs, employees from different business units with different use cases, and an expectation of a high level of service internally. It’s really a daunting task even for small to mid-size organizations. Exacerbating this is the fact that at most small and mid-size companies and even some enterprises, this is an added task to someone with a full set of responsibilities elsewhere in the infrastructure.
A Samsung study in 2022 noted that enterprises with mobility programs spend between $157 (10K employees) and $458 (250 employees) per employee annually to manage these programs. All that hard cost, along with the opportunity cost of IT resource usage often produces sub-optimal results and significant business challenges for IT Leaders. These include:
- Cost Inefficiencies
- Budget variability
- Shadow IT Initiatives
- Security Risks
- Poor User Experiences
Mobility costs are often some of the most inefficient in a company’s infrastructure. First, matching usage and behaviors to dynamic plans is difficult and often not looked at regularly due to resource constraints. Additionally, a lack of dynamic pricing/plan information at their fingertips and a need to focus on other initiatives in their scope make it difficult for IT leaders to have oversight. This results in unused lines, unused data, data overages, unnecessary fees, users without needed features, and more. Second, companies don’t have optimized tools to help them do it, either lacking a tool as a small or mid-size company or as a large company using a Telecommunications Expense Management (TEM) platform better suited to making sure you are getting billed according to your plan rather than optimizing the actual plans themselves. With these cost inefficiencies often comes budget variability as plans that are not right sized to usage and behavior create new, frequent and unnecessary cost events creating unwanted dynamics in monthly bills.
Mobility without oversight becomes another area within IT Infrastructure that drives Shadow IT initiatives. For example, Field and Marketing business units procuring and using devices, adding features, adjusting plans, downloading and engaging new applications, and more is a form of Shadow IT. These activities add to cost challenges and variability, complicate user support, encourage more Shadow behavior and create new and unforeseen risks for the organization.
Devices are another vector for security vulnerability in an organization. This encompasses company provided devices as well as personal devices being used to access company applications like email, collaboration, CRM, ERP, Finance, etc. Executives and rank and file employees alike are accessing critical applications and information on their devices every day, often without proper protection or even to avoid complex protocols on corporate PC’s. Bad actors know this and have been working to exploit mobile users more and more with Ransomware and other attacks. Even companies with good endpoint protection strategies and managed detection and response services are often missing similar protocols on their employees’ mobile devices. This is a hole companies concerned with their security posture need to close quickly.
This compounds with the fact that IT leaders get measured and perceived internally based on the experiences of their users. You need to deliver a quality device, quality service in critical locations and access to important applications for every user on the plans. You also need to make it simple if there is a desired change in plan and/or carrier to create efficiencies for an organization. This can involve procuring, shipping and configuring devices, enabling features like international calling dynamically, facilitating a change in carrier through a SIM card and more. It is not easy to juggle all this along with your day-to-day activities.
As you can see mobility is a required use case in many organizations but comes with significant challenges. It’s a perfect place to seek help from the ecosystem and get more time to focus on core business initiatives. This is one of the areas Amplix gets the most requests to help. You can find cost efficiencies, ongoing oversight help and mitigate risk with trusted advisors and the right technology vendor partners.
