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The rapid adoption of mobile devices and smartphones has significantly expanded the workspace beyond the confines of the traditional office and has contributed towards greater organizational productivity. With today’s sophisticated handheld devices, employees can stay connected to business critical information anytime and anywhere, allowing them to work while on the move. Consequently, enterprise mobile messaging solutions have become integral to the IT infrastructure of organizations large and small. Among the choices available today, however, only a few successfully deliver a positive overall mobile experience – the main factor in delivering long term satisfaction both to end users and to IT administrators who deploy and manage the solution.
Why Experience Matters
Historically, trying to balance the requirements of IT with the desires of end users has resulted in a compromised mobile experience for IT, end users or both. Solutions were chosen primarily based on features. But user feedback tells us that a long feature list does not necessarily translate to the best overall experience. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen points out: “Every additional feature is one more thing to learn, one more thing to possibly misunderstand, and one more thing to search through when looking for the one thing you want.”
Organizations are beginning to understand that the key to a successful mobile messaging deployment is its ability to meet business requirements and at the same time provide a hassle free experience — to the IT team that has to support it and the employees who use it. A practical and easy to set up solution with an intuitive or familiar interface effectively delivers greater productivity to both the end user and the organization.
Thus, it is the overall experience that differentiates one mobile solution from another. The solution which delivers the most benefits to the organization is one which supports rigorous security needs as well as comprehensive management capability while at the same time offering an intuitive and easy-to-use interface and features that empower end users. These benefits can be measured in terms of time, effort, and cost savings:
- Reduced pressure on IT support
- Shorter learning curve and faster user adoption
- Increased user satisfaction and productivity
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
These benefits are critically important when considering a mobile messaging solution.
Defining the Mobile Experience
A mobile messaging solution offers fundamentally different experiences for IT and the end user, and each must be evaluated when looking at the total mobile experience. An effective solution should be able to strike the right balance of control between what the end user wants – to get things done in an easy and personalized manner – and the IT administrator’s need to easily secure and manage a fleet of handheld devices.
To determine the kind of experience a particular solution delivers, decision makers must be able to evaluate it on the basis of its security, manageability and usability as these are the three factors that determine positive experience – for the user as well as the enterprise IT staff. For a mobile solution to provide a good experience for IT, it must be:
- Easy to secure – Security is of constant concern because pushing corporate data out to numerous mobile devices effectively extends the boundaries of the enterprise, introducing another avenue for unauthorized access to corporate data. A robust mobile solution should provide for end to end security encompassing all handheld devices, and IT administrators must have the tools needed to prevent unauthorized use of devices connected to the corporate network.
- Easy to deploy and manage – Mobile solutions that are easy to deploy always succeed when compared with more complex options. Deploying a mobile solution across multiple devices comes at a cost, as does routine management such as upgrades and installations. Organizations should be aware of these costs and opt for a solution that also provides a high return on investment (ROI) and brings down the total cost of ownership (TCO). An optimal solution empowers IT administrators to manage and upgrade software on mobile devices simply and with minimal manual intervention.
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