* End-user stats help with top-down planning
Recently, Cisco teamed up with the Economist Intelligence Unit to survey 1,500 global workers about how they perceived the relationship between productivity and mobility.
The key findings indicate individual workers do link the use of mobile technology with their job success (31% ranked mobile tools “critical” to job success and 44% ranked them “very important”). And close to three-fourths asserted that increased access to mobile tools in places where they currently have few or none would increase their efficiency.
The study indicated that employees are going to be “more mobile” in the next couple of years and would like their employers to do more for them to help improve their connectivity while on the road; about 26% were unsatisfied with the mobile support they receive today. Users cited the top three mobility benefits as “improved responsiveness to colleagues,” “being better informed” and “faster decision-making.”
This is all good insight and a good first step toward building an enterprise-wide mobility plan, advocated in my last newsletter. Mobility – now taking the form of internal wireless LANs, hot spot services, cellular voice and data services and smarter and more varied end-user devices – is becoming a strategic and embedded component of the enterprise IT infrastructure, just as routing, switching and security are.
Still, as mentioned last time, most mobile deployments – other than vertical applications – tend to be driven by a user request here and there and are often expensed as a monthly reimbursable item. And much of the deployment specifics lie in the hands of the mobile providers: coverage of a certain service with adequate bandwidth may not exist where given users may need it, and it might not be available with the most appropriate mobile device for those users.
And when mobile users are off site, who’s making sure that the security and management aspects of the connection and user device are under control? Good progress has been made in this area from a technology and service standpoint, but of all the various aspects of IT and networking, mobility is perhaps the most nascent in this regard.
All members of the industry must participate to bring maturity to the mobile evolution. For enterprises to simply invest in more mobile tools to boost productivity without thinking through the management, security and cost ramifications isn’t wise. They might want to spring for hot-spot access for all their traveling employees, for example. But is this safe? (See last week’s newsletter on the “Evil Twin” issue.) It can be: but policies and procedures must be in place first.
And traditionally consumer-focused mobile network operators will eventually need to be more enterprise-focused and flexible to accommodate business requirements. Let’s hope they’re not so consumed with merger details that they back-burner their enterprise efforts.
