Enterprise Mobility and its role in IT

The media tablet market did not exist in early 2010. But now, millions of workers use these tablets in the enterprise every day, and the tablet market is just the tip of the mobility iceberg. Just below the surface lies a torrent of innovations that includes mobile applications, social media, mobile health, cloud computing, mobile payments, interconnected machines, mobile collaboration and wireless technologies. In this area also exists the term “Business Aligned IT”. 

Enterprise mobility management (EMM) is the set of people, processes and approaches to which a business will make use of the mobility software in how a business is able to run. Enterprise mobility is a term that describes a shift in work habits and a manner of work to which workers in a business can work in a more mobile type of manner. An employee may upload a corporate presentation from his or her desktop PC and then be able to share it with other workers many miles away – and all to good effect. The quality is seamless.

The lines between mobile application development, enterprise mobility management and mobile infrastructure get blurrier by the day. It's hard to find the right tools to properly manage and secure apps after they've been built, and even harder to connect these apps to existing enterprise systems. Enterprises often organize their people into functional silos (for example, human resources, legal, business managers, security group, networking group, application group or workstation group) to improve operational efficiency. Such an organizational structure makes it difficult to solve mobility problems because the solutions often span many operational domains. Many enterprises tend to focus on a single overriding mobility issue (for example, security). However, the desire to focus on a single issue can mask other important issues and result in unintended consequences. 

The process of creating mobile solutions often requires that enterprises make decisions between various conflicting trade offs. The enterprise may believe that maximizing user experience is important for a particular mobile solution and therefore decide to build a resident mobile application instead of mandating the use of SHVD. The effect of "sliding" the user experience tab from "worse" to "better," moves the security risk tab from "less" to "more" (because sensitive data is stored on the mobile device) and moves the network dependency tab from "more" to "less" (because mobile data is stored on the device instead of on a remote server).