Driving the mobility message through the channel

Following The Government’s Operational Efficiency report in April, The Times notes that with UK national debt set to surpass £2 trillion, civil servants are being encouraged to make better use of office space and allow vacant property to be sold – forcing them to work elsewhere.  In light of all these pressures, companies are looking to mobilise their workforces to ensure that they remain productive outside of office walls. Thus, the important role of the channel in educating end-user organisations about how best to implement a mobility strategy cannot be underestimated.

In the current financial climate, the ability to control costs and demonstrate true ROI have become elevated priorities for the CIO. This presents the channel with a unique opportunity to help customers understand why mobility should be top of mind. For many customers, the question should not be “What is the cost of implementing a mobility strategy?” but “What is the cost of NOT implementing a mobility strategy?” Mobility costs in organisations without policies in place can be both significant and hard to rein in, as voice and data roaming charges and remote access support costs mount up.

As important as mobility is in today's enterprise, mobile employees tend to be among the worst offenders when it comes to ‘black budget’ expenses. The ‘black budget’ refers to expenses associated with mobility which are almost impossible for the IT department to trace because they are buried in expense claim forms for hourly or daily WiFi subscriptions. These WiFi subscriptions are often astronomically expensive, so the overall cost of an ad-hoc approach to mobile connectivity can be significant. Resellers can point to a very rapid return on investment which can be achieved by eradicating the mobility black budget. By offering the right kinds of technologies, resellers can ensure that the cost of mobility is as transparent and predictable as possible.

The cost of not implementing a coherent mobility strategy can also be measured in terms of complexity. Companies that are proactive about assessing their mobility needs will find themselves in a far better position further down the line than those which fail to even consider this until it is too late. Increasingly, employees bring in their own mobile devices and simply expect the IT department to support them. With each new connection and mobile device, support and billing costs rise and mobile device security becomes far more complex. It is not just financial costs which can spiral when mobility is left to become a free for all, but also management overhead. Simply by raising awareness, partners can potentially save their customers significant headaches down the line.

There is also a misconception in some industry sectors that flexible working is an HR benefit or perk, suggesting that the individual rather than the organisation benefits more from such policies. According to the Public Sector Forum, the benefits of flexible working practices include improved employee productivity, a reduction in sick leave and absenteeism by 4-5 days per year  for each employee, and a sizeable reduction in employees’ carbon footprints. The UK government is even showing its support of this working trend by enforcing a new legislation that gives parents with children under 16 the right to work flexibly. A TUC spokesman commented that the new law: “is not only important in allowing individuals to better manage work with other commitments, but as research has shown, it enables businesses to operate more effectively in a changed society.”  It is also a fact that fresh talent is entering the workplace with a new set of expectations. ‘Generation Y’ has prioritised a work-life balance, and employers are having to meet their expectations by taking their work flexibility demands seriously.

From a technology perspective, the channel has to play its traditional role of finding the best mix of technologies for each particular customer, but unlike most of IT, there is a definite HR angle to mobile working. Traditionally, responsibility for mobile working has fallen somewhere between IT and HR – often settling on the shoulders of the CIO. In the same way the CIO has to engage with the HR department to find out how technology can enable the organisation’s vision for mobile working, so any channel partner must also consider the wider picture. Some pieces of the IT puzzle – server and storage infrastructure for example – have a far less obvious impact on how end-users work; provided the technology works and performs acceptably, end-users could not care less about what back-end systems are delivering their applications. However, with a mobility implementation, workers get a far greater feel for the results and are more directly affected by the technical aspects of the implementation. Resellers must therefore help customers implement technologies which on the one hand deliver what HR requires, but on the other hand must create a solution which delivers the ease-of-use and always-on connectivity demanded by employees.
 
Mobility represents a significant opportunity for the channel. Many resellers and systems integrators talk about helping customers transform their businesses – mobility is one technology area that can truly revolutionise the way companies do business. Not only can mobile working increase productivity and therefore profitability, but it also creates a workplace which gives employees greater freedom and which is potentially more attractive to new employees. The corporate world should undoubtedly be taking the benefits of flexible working and mobility more seriously; the channel needs to seize the opportunity to drive this message home.