Put mobile devices into your employees’ hands and they can spend all day on Facebook. That’s clearly not the aim of workforce mobility; the business usually hopes to enable collaboration and communication, access to business applications from offsite, and overall better productivity. Take time to think through how you’ll manage and control mobile access in order to ensure the business gets the results it wants.

1. Define Your Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) Policy

Some businesses will hand employees tablets or other specialized mobile devices, but most employees will use their own devices to perform routine business functions. Don’t surrender control along with the choice of device. Define a BYOD policy that spells out your company policy on how mobile devices can be used to access corporate information, the employees’ responsibilities to protect corporate data on their personal devices, and the controls the business is implementing to enforce those responsibilities and provide additional protection.

2. Add Security And Simplify Access

Make it easy for employees to access corporate resources while enhancing security through implementing a provisioning process that also enables controls. Use enterprise mobility management, mobile device management, and mobile application management software to manage which users and devices are allowed to access corporate resources. These tools give you the ability to define the users’ privileges during remote access, ensuring your information security.

3. Make Sure You Have Network Bandwidth

Make sure your wireless network will provide the bandwidth and reliability needed to support use of mobile devices on premises, potentially including streaming video in support of collaboration. Without a plan, increased mobile device usage can reduce your WLAN’s performance and hurt productivity.

4. Streamline Workflows

If your employees are doing their jobs with different devices, should they have to do their jobs the same way? Gaining productivity benefits from mobility may require more than simply allowing employees to use mobile devices. Consider redesigning workflows to make them easier to accomplish with mobile devices, especially those that require lots of data entry or have complex interfaces that are difficult to use on smaller screens.

5. Rethink Your IT Infrastructure

Productivity on mobile devices requires more than just bandwidth. It requires making the right choices of applications and building the necessary infrastructure to allow users to access them on virtual desktops. This means rethinking the devices in your data center as well as those in your employees’ hands.

Prescient Solutions offers complete mobility solutions to businesses and organizations in the Chicago and Schaumburg areas. Our IT consulting and managed services teams make empowering your employees with mobile devices easy, handling everything from provisioning to help desk to enterprise mobility management software and mobile security. Contact us to learn how to make mobility an effective part of your information technology strategy.