The explosion of mobile devices—tablets, smartphones and other wireless devices—is enough to stress any IT team to the max. Between security issues and upgrades to international travel, managing pooling plans, shutting off decommissioned devices and pricing that seems to change quarterly as the carriers fight for your business, most businesses lack the tools, manpower or expertise to manage devices effectively. In this post, I outline some of the top challenges IT departments face when it comes to mobility management.

  1. Lack of Centralized Visibility

Most enterprise clients have several wireless carriers managed out of separate portals and lack a consolidated view. Without a simple interface to provide insight into various factors like spending patterns, variances and forecasts, company-wide asset distribution, billing history, and other items, it can be difficult to assist employees with trouble shooting, as well as procuring and tracking orders and managing invoices.

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  1. Personnel Burden

The weight on IT and finance departments investing time in day-to-day mobility-related tasks can cause frustration.  As a secondary function to their primary role, stakeholders invested in mobility management can benefit from a customized configuration that fully integrates with internal accounts payable systems, different defined visibility based on hierarchy, as well as custom reports about variances, usage, spend and ticket activity.

  1. Wasteful Spending

Thanks to the dynamic nature of mobility, businesses may spend more than necessary each month due to not having a pulse on its carrier expenses. Exploring a lifecycle management tool that can analyze bills as granular as the employee level can help determine the most cost-effective wireless plans. And when centralized, technology can be matched to business requirements so billing can be consolidated into a single, uniform monthly invoice.

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  1. Inefficient Workflow

Many organizations lack a defined process to manage mobility related tasks, causing chaos due to a shoddy workflow process or poor tracking. By recording everything from the beginning—like employee tech requirements to disposal services and replacement devices for disaster recovery, lifecycle management of devices becomes easier and more efficient. A clean process that clearly identifies stakeholders and their roles allows for easier device management throughout its lifecycle.

  1. Security

The explosion of cloud and social media in business has created significant compliance risks. By working with an MDM tool, business leaders can easily deploy, manage and protect mobile devices from a single, user-friendly interface. With the ability to quickly register devices, remotely configure and update device settings, enforce security policies and compliance, secure mobile access to corporate data, locate lost or stolen devices, and remotely lock and wipe vulnerable data, business leaders can maintain control over sensitive data and apps.

There are so many more reasons moving away from a BYOD policy and moving toward an MDM tool can make business sense for your organization.