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March 27, 2015

Avoiding Enterprise Mobile Management: A Futile Exercise in Procrastination

By TMCnet Special Guest
Steve Brasen, Managing Research Director, EMA

IT operations managers are cringing all around the world – desperately avoiding those inevitable words from their executive management, “you need to support enterprise mobility.” The concerns are understandable. After all, IT administrators are already over-taxed with supporting desktop, server, application, and infrastructure management requirements. Asking them to layer a whole new management discipline on top of that can be a daunting prospect. IT managers finding themselves in this predicament often recognize it as an opportunity to practice the fine art of procrastination. Particularly skilled procrastinators will employ one or more of the following excuses:

  • We don’t have the money
  • We don’t have the time
  • We don’t have administrative staff knowledgeable in managing mobile technologies

While this avoidance strategy has proven successful in many organizations, it is, in fact, only a temporary solution. Smartphones and tablets, whether supplied by a business or brought in by employees, have become commonplace in organizations across all major industry verticals. According to EMA research, 89 percent of all business professionals rely on a mobile device to regularly perform job tasks, requiring broad but secure access to business applications, data, and other services. Typically of greater urgency, however, is when the CEO receives a gold-plated smartphone for his birthday and wants to use it to access business resources to impress his friends while awaiting his turn on the 16th hole at the local golf club. At that point, the jig is up, and the need to deliver full enterprise mobility management (EMM) is inevitable. But this doesn’t necessarily mean IT managers must surrender to stretching their already exhausted administrative resources. After all, the purpose of procrastination is ultimately to minimize efforts (though poorly executed procrastination may actually back-fire and increase work challenges). The secret to successfully satisfying EMM requirements while at the same time reducing administrative efforts is the introduction of IT management efficiencies.

Traditional endpoint lifecycle management processes (i.e., PC management) commonly involve the complete control and management of desktops and all installed software components from initial deployment through final retirement. This approach is possible in an environment supporting a single architecture (such as Window PCs) but attempting to apply this to the broadly heterogeneous deployments necessary to support workforce mobility is tantamount to drinking the proverbial ocean. Instead, organizations should not attempt to control the entirety of the endpoints and instead focus on the optimal and secure delivery of business IT services (applications, data, email, etc.). This is not to say the devices themselves should no longer be managed, but monitoring and administration tasks should be limited to just the configuration elements necessary to secure and run business services. This approach substantially reduces the amount of required support effort while empowering end users with the ability to perform unfettered personal tasks on their devices (e.g., Candy Crush, Minecraft, and watching amusing cat videos). The secure delivery of business IT services is further simplified by introducing three core mobile management capabilities:

Automation: Any repeatable process can be automated, and the more that are, the less mundane day-to-day activities there are that need to be performed by operations. Commonly automated tasks for EMM include software provisioning, asset discovery, application/email configuration, and data loss prevention.

Role-Based Management: By categorizing users and their devices into logically segmented groups based on the users’ job function or role (i.e., accountants, salesmen, developers, etc.), a common set of profiles can be established defining access privileges, configurations, and application availability. Often, these groups are already identified in a listing service, such as Active Directory. In this way, on-boarding new users requires little, if any, administrator interaction as all settings have already been predefined.

User Self-Service: One unprecedented aspect to enterprise mobility is that employees overwhelmingly prefer self-service. This should be encouraged. By consolidating enterprise resources onto a centralized service catalog or app store, users are empowered to select and install the software element most critical to their job function. And the beauty of it is that they achieve this without having to interact with IT administrators.

So clearly, EMM practices do not need to be a challenge to adopt at all – even for the most ardent procrastinator. In fact, I would argue that the recognition achieved from introducing a service that mostly manages itself far outweighs the relatively minor efforts required for its implementation. And, of course, no price can be placed on the value of rescuing the CEO from the embarrassment of cell phone inadequacy at an informal executive summit. 

About the Author: Steve Brasen is Managing Research Director, EMA 




Edited by Dominick Sorrentino


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