Mobility: Optimizing Business

The other day, CIO posted a great slideshow on the many ways organizations are using iPads to transform the way they do business, from an archaeologist's sketches to a police force's suspect database (two of those organizations are Zenprise customers, by the way).

This is a great example of something we've been thinking a lot about here at Zenprise – using mobile not just to manage BYOD but to optimize business. As we've considered ways to organize our customers' mobile application and mobile device management use cases and requirements, as well as how those use cases impact the value they're getting from their mobile plans, we came up with this mobile maturity model.

The first stage is "unmanaged" and describes a BYOD deployment without an MDM solution in place (e.g., managing via ActiveSync), which may be fine for a small number of users and few security requirements. The second is "managed" and describes BYOD with some level of basic MDM functionality (lock, wipe, lifecycle management). The third is "advanced" and describes a mobile deployment (BYOD and/or additional mobile business applications) that is secure end-to-end and runs on an enterprise-grade infrastructure. And finally – and where many of these CIO.com use cases come in – is the "optimized" stage, which describes a mobile deployment that facilitates one or more strategic mobile business applications.

Why the curve? We've observed this in our customers' deployments, and it's early days still, so we look forward to seeing how this plays out over a longer period and more organizations, but our initial view is that the more ad hoc deployments are completely unmanaged and risky and generate no value, but they are typically lower in risk than the more basic managed deployments only because they have fewer devices typically. The managed category is where the deployments get bigger, so they're likely to be higher-value, however that value is offset by a the higher risk of having a managed-yet-unsecured mobile environment. Then, as organizations move into the advanced category and secure their mobile environments as well as deploy on infrastructure that supports their uptime and scalability requirements, they get more out of it – they reduce their risk and start to get productivity gains. Then, as they move into the optimized category and roll out more than just BYOD, but multiple high-performing strategic apps that add to the top line of their business (or at least transform the operations so significantly that the organization sees a dramatic bottom line improvement), they can begin to change the shape of their mobile ROI curve.