Additional Blogs by SAP
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
0 Kudos

You’ve heard it often enough: Enterprise mobility can’t be achieved overnight. However, it’s not until you’re knee-deep in the multitude of considerations – from what devices to support to evaluating infrastructure ramifications – that this new IT reality truly sinks in. Enterprise mobility is not a sprint; it’s a marathon.

If you’ve already taken the first step and put an initial mobile plan in place, it’s important to keep the momentum going. Too often, during this middle leg of the mobile journey, mobile teams lose steam because they don’t how to reap the rewards of their newfound capabilities. With 58% of organizations expecting a return on investment (ROI) within 24 months,1 it’s not enough to simply move your business into the mobile realm – you must deliver results!

To help, we’ve created an interactive guide that helps you pinpoint where you are on your mobile journey and provides you with actionable, practical tips for optimizing your current investment, including downloadable checklists from Maribel Lopez of Lopez Research LLC on how to progress to the next level. You can check it out here.


In the meantime, here are three tips to keeping your mobile enterprise moving forward:


Tip #1: Avoid Point Solutions Detours


With their lower costs and features focused on a single business problem, point solutions can be enticing. However, gobbling up various point solutions over time creates tons of IT overhead, along with multiple apps to manage. In fact, data silos between the solutions can cause data redundancies and inaccuracies that can push lines of business to go with their gut on making decisions rather than trust the data that’s being supplied to them. Do you want to have custom development for every mobile device you must support applied to every point system you purchase?

Instead, consider a platform solution that has the flexibility to adapt to your business needs. With a single platform, IT can reduce user dependencies and simplify the technology landscape. In-memory platforms, for example, are helping change the pace of business by bringing actionable information to the forefront in real time. This technology enables companies to quickly capture and analyze vast amounts of data from diverse sources – sales, customer data, and social media sentiment.

By integrating transactional and analytics data within a single platform, IT professionals can cut out unnecessary data movement and processing times. Who wouldn’t want that type of speed and accuracy delivered to their mobile device?


While becoming mobile is all about taking advantage of the moment, your strategy must be built on long-term goals. Before choosing a point solution, think about the destination you’re ultimately driving toward.


Tip #2: Build a Team That Can Move the Needle


Mobile solutions can accelerate growth and expand your business’s potential only when your workforce is actively using the applications you’ve established. It’s a huge misconception that mobile solutions and data can be delivered only to the executive team or data analysts. Buy-in, across your organization, is mandatory for making the most of your mobile investment. However, too often enterprise mobility initiatives begin without any full-time resources being applied.

At some point IT must drive the creation of a focused team to help onboard the organization. To ensure your mobile plan stays on track, start by securing a leader who is proficient in driving and delivering on innovation in production scenarios, not just in pilots. This team lead will be responsible for building and communicating ROI for all mobile initiatives. It’s critical that your first full-time hire can garner enough credibility across the business to drive projects forward.

Here are some other roles to look for when building out a mobile-focused team:

  • Solution architect
  • Usability specialist
  • Business analyst
  • HR specialist

The team that you build is the same team that must train the organization and rally them around the possibilities and ROI that real-time access to data can foster. Now is the time to quickly show your business the value of its data. Ensure each user understands that he or she has a huge part to play in your enterprise mobility initiative.

Tip #3: Make Way for Accelerated Decisions and Responses


Welcome to no more silos and no more disjointed tactics. A mobile organization empowers employees to understand the critical, strategic goal of the business and work collectively with their peers toward that goal. For IT, enterprise mobility produces users who can take control of their business needs without as much assistance. Most importantly, the time it takes to discover and act on insights is faster and more cost-effective. With mobile access, you can expect to see real-time results across the following array of use cases:

  • Product or service innovation
  • Customer service and support
  • Pricing optimization
  • Market and competitive intelligence
  • Process operations optimization and control


Your Enterprise Mobility Roadmap Is Here


It doesn’t take mobile maturity to achieve results. Unleash your enterprise mobility possibilities now. Access the interactive guide to enterprise mobility, “Destination: Possibility” from SAP that gives you action-oriented direction on extending your existing processes and discovering the unlimited potential mobile can bring to your business.



1J. Gold Associates, “Enterprise Mobile Applications: A Study of Strategies and Trends”