Workplace mobility can have a significant impact on modern-day businesses. It can affect different aspects of your business processes and facilitate in creating revolutionary and innovative business models that may have the potential to change how business activities are performed. Mobility is among the latest technology trends such as cloud computing, business VoIP, SaaS, e-commerce, which provides a great competitive advantage to businesses over their rivals.
Many organizations can benefit from mobility strategies such as consumerization of advanced information technology. Moreover, the adaptation of mobility in modern workplaces has forced many organizations to redesign their structure, redefine job responsibilities, and to foster a tech-friendly culture. There are many core areas which are affected by promoting mobility in the workplace; however, the area of the IT department gets affected the most.
In a conventional business with traditional office phone systems and rigid processes, IT department is formed as a hierarchical structure solely responsible for managing infrastructure, business phone, networks, and applications for every department in an organization. However, businesses who encourage mobility at the workplace have equipped employees with mobile devices to provide access to enterprise data. They may provide company-owned devices to employees or perhaps practice “Bring Your Own Device” policy.
Consequently, IT teams face additional challenges in maintaining infrastructure and networks that may facilitate different kinds of devices and seamlessly integrate with the company’s ecosystem. Devices with different specifications such as hardware, screen resolution, and operating system, to name a few, may cause integration, security, and deployment issues among many other potential problems. They may also need to collaborate with VoIP providers to design communication processes.
That being said, mobility provides an excellent opportunity for organizations to better understand the IT requirements of their users and allows them to devise strategies to streamline and improve their information systems to facilitate seamless intra-department communications as well as coordination between different departments.
Furthermore, in today’s dynamic and fast-paced business environment, it is impractical to devise a long-term strategic goal, especially in formulating roles pertaining to information technology. This becomes more challenging due to a shift in IT roles and responsibilities caused by adopting workplace mobility practices. For instance, duties of chief information officer and IT teams have evolved from an operation-support orientated role to developers of key business initiatives.
Apart from IT functions, many departmental roles and processes are affected by mobility due to changed organizational structures. Thus, it is important for businesses to make comprehensive transitional plans if they are looking to shift towards workplace mobility. This will ensure successful implementation of enterprise mobility, and thus provide a competitive edge to companies over their rivals.
It must be noted that adoption of mobility is not limited to technology such as business VoIP, conferencing or integration tools, it is about understanding requirements of employees and devising processes, policies, and models that may benefit an organization to improve its core activities. Therefore, Chief Information Officer and senior management must assume the responsibility of embedding mobility in workplace culture and philosophy. Mobility is more than checking e-mail or having access to some files. Hence, the focus should be placed upon security, functionality, and user experience to ensure that business can truly benefit from workplace mobility.
If you need assistance in enhancing your company’s unified communications, contact Monster VoIP today to find out how we can help. Monster VoIP provides the best business phones for small business, which ensures effective communication throughout the organization with office phone systems.
