The Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) market is undergoing rapid change, in response to enterprises focusing on mobile to increase customer satisfaction and workforce productivity. Mobility programs like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) require the enterprise to develop policies that treat corporate mobile apps separately from the personal apps that employees run on their devices.
In response, the lines have blurred between Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Mobile Application Management (MAM) vendors, as they evolve their product portfolios to provide more fine-grained control of mobile apps.
Provisioning, Configuration, Distribution and Security are the First Steps to Achieving Enterprise Mobility Goals
What can get lost in this mobile alphabet soup is how EMM vendors enable customers to achieve the strategic goals of their mobility initiatives – to raise customer satisfaction and workforce productivity.
MDM vendors enable enterprises to provision, register, configure, and inventory mobile devices. With MDM solutions, enterprises set device-wide security and data protection policies, and provision bundles of software to devices.
With MAM solutions, enterprises distribute mobile apps through app stores and set policies for security, configuration, and provisioning for individual apps, and workforce groups. They enable enterprises to manage the application lifecycle, as new versions, patches, and upgrades are made available.
These capabilities are necessary for mobility initiatives, but by themselves, don’t enable enterprises to improve customer satisfaction and workforce productivity.
Excellent Mobile End User Experience Drives Gains in Customer Satisfaction and Mobile Workforce Productivity
End user experience management products augment the domain-specific metrics and analytics provided by MDM and MAM vendors with visibility into important aspects of the enterprise end user – their identity, role, and business function, the full range of apps and devices they use, and the business activities for which employees are responsible. This information is critical for IT Ops and the line of business to measure, manage, and improve workforce productivity.
For IT Ops to prioritize their response to an incident, they need to understand the business impact, the functional organization and business locations of the impacted users, and whether desktop users are also impacted.
For the line of business to determine whether or not mobile is improving workforce productivity, they need metrics and analysis in terms that are relevant to the business, such as the length of time to fill out a claim form, or the number of orders processed, or not completed, by employees in a remote branch office.
Widespread mobile app adoption is the key to improving mobile workforce productivity. To drive adoption, a mobile app must be:
- well-architected
- intuitive to use
- compatible with multiple operating systems
- secure
- easy to find in the corporate app store
MDM, MAM, and MADP vendors play key roles in these steps. But ensuring excellent mobile user experience only begins there. It continues with the app’s usage and performance in the field. That’s where mobile end user experience management comes in.
