Gone are the days when employees were obligated to work from a single place using fixed designated device. Now organizations are empowering their employees to become a lot more mobile in their work approach. Enterprise mobility is facilitating employees to use mobile devices for carrying out their work duties in a flexible and convenient way.
Business is no longer restricted within a centralized space, it can move to wherever the employee chooses to go. Making all of this possible is the concept of enterprise mobility management (EMM), which refers to all the technologies, processes, services, and policies that manage and administer the mobile devices, mobile computing services, and wireless networks that are being used in ensuring enterprise mobility for an organization.
It’s difficult to imagine smooth and efficient use of mobile devices in workplace without the implementation of enterprise mobility management. EMM plays an important role in keeping the enterprise data on various mobile devices being used safe and secure. It focuses mainly on security, privacy, and enterprise application integration, essentially driving the success of the enterprise mobility solutions. Because enterprise mobility will gain increasing momentum in the coming times, the need for sound enterprise mobility management strategies would rise too.
Let’s look at how the trends and developments for enterprise mobility management look like in the future:
IoT will Witness an Expansion in Its Use
Internet of Things, or IoT, is a term already well-known. Organizations may even have implemented IoT within their workplace to make it smarter. But currently it’s still not widely used in the setting of enterprise mobility. The truth is that combining enterprise mobility management and IoT can be a mutually beneficial prospect for both these technology areas. The future will see enterprise app development being done as per real-world application areas that could benefit from the combination of IoT and enterprise mobility.
Artificial Intelligence will Rise in Prominence Too
Artificial intelligence is another niche technology area, like IoT, and it will too attain a bigger role in enterprise mobility management in the future. As the scope of AI improves and it becomes more and more pivotal to our daily lives, it’s natural for it to get closely intertwined with enterprise mobility as well. AI can help in improving decision-making workflow, process management, employee experience, and communication flow, all of which are important to EMM. Bringing together AI and EMM can open up doors to incredible opportunities, as we will see in the future.
Focus and Attention on Security will Increase
Maintaining security for data, applications, devices, and networks is an important principle of enterprise mobility management. Whether it’s employees bringing their own devices to work on or the use of cloud for enabling the mobility, security is a critical area for various facets of enterprise mobility. Thankfully, great milestones are expected to be achieved in this area as time progresses. With increased focus and attention being given to improving security in enterprise mobility, one can hope that more and more businesses would be willing to come forward and implement enterprise mobility.
Device Mobility will Gain New Meanings
When we think of devices commonly used in enterprise mobility, devices like laptops, tablets, and smart phones immediately come to the mind. But the advancements in mobile technology are taking place at a fast rate, and soon we can see smart watches and smart glasses becoming more mainstream. This futuristic idea where wearable items like watches and glasses also come under the purview of mobile devices can be seen in conjunction with enterprise mobility management. We may get to see a wide range of enterprise mobility solutions being developed that cater to these cutting-edge mobile devices.
Mobile Analytics will be Explored Furthermore
The future is likely to see mobile analytics being explored in new ways to uncover different possibilities and opportunities. For instance, machine based learning and data may be used for generating useful insights related to prescriptive and predictive analytics in real time. How will mobile analytics being used in this way benefit an organization? Well, as the workforce of an organization switches to the mobile way of working, it becomes necessary for the organization to evaluate how well this move to mobility is working out in reality. There needs to be a way where they can clearly see the results being produced by the implementation of enterprise mobility solutions, including the impact on the productivity levels of the employees.
Only when the organization can see results, can they be assured that enterprise mobility is a beneficial path for them. The prescriptive and predictive insights can help organizations understand their enterprise mobility efforts in a better and more substantial way. If they feel satisfied with the way mobility is turning out for them, they may even like to adopt it to a greater extent.
Hardware Quality will Improve Greatly
We have talked about the great strides that enterprise mobility management will make in terms of adoption of new technologies and ideas and improvement of various aspects within its own model. But the future of EMM transcends way beyond this. At the heart of it all are the mobile devices that help in accomplishing the idea of enterprise mobility. In the future, mobile devices will become more user-friendly and robust to better execute their important role in enterprise mobility. Devices that look and perform better will certainly add incredible value to the notion of enterprise mobility.
Conclusion
The idea that employees can work only from their desk inside the office is fast becoming outdated. Organizations want to give their workforce a flexible way of working with enterprise mobility, so that the employee productivity which is thus improved can consequently also improve the overall business productivity. The avenue of enterprise mobility management will continue to be navigated in further detail in the future to devise refined ways for achieving mobility within an enterprise and offer secure, superb, and seamless work experiences to the workforce no matter where they choose to work from.
It’s rather interesting that ioT will witness an expansion as you mentioned once we join the trend in mobility management like other businesses. I do agree that security is one of the purposes of this strategy so the focus and attention on security will increase as you pointed out. If hardware quality will improve greatly as you said, we may no longer need to spend too much as long as we follow what other businesses do and also get this service.