Future of Enterprise Mobility

In this article, I will share my personal views on the future of enterprise mobility. As most of the

readers are likely to be thought leaders in their respective disciplines, I will try to share unique

insights and forward-looking perspectives on this topic that has hitherto only seen clichéd

descriptions of BYOD (Bring your own device) and MDM (Mobile Device Management).

At the outset, I will attempt to define Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) as it exists today.

Enterprise mobility management is the set of capabilities and tools that allow IT administrators

manage (read control, track, monitor) devices, applications on those devices and secure data

passing through those apps so the right information is available to the right people at the right

time. You may have heard of “any time, any place, and any device”. Is it a perfect definition?

Probably not, I think EMM has much more to it than what the above description conveys. The

problem with such a description is that it doesn’t highlight EMM as an “Intelligent Platform”.

I think that would be a key differentiator. But it does reflect a popular interpretation of the term

among CIOs and IT administrators.

The idea of EMM as it is viewed today has an uncanny similarity to the ideas around Enterprise

Resource Planning (ERP) in the mid to late 90’s. I am sure most of the readers were around at

the time too. Think about it - ERP is all about optimizing and diverting resources in an enterprise

so the right resource is available to meet the right demand at the right time. Likewise, EMM

seeks to optimize and create efficiencies in the system by mobilizing the workplace i.e. by

disrupting the notion that an enterprise exists within the four walls.

Today’s enterprise knows no boundaries. And that’s what makes EMM all the more powerful

and disruptive in its potential to transform the very nature of how businesses operate. As you

read further, you will see why the above definition of enterprise mobility management, although

commonplace, is an oversimplification and understatement of its potential.

Enterprise Mobility Management invariably involves extolling the merits of Bring your own

device (BYOD), a trend which has seen employees (device users) bringing their personal

devices to work and trying to access corporate resources. With no DRM/DLP protection in

place, which is usually enabled by implementing industry leading enterprise mobility suites, it’s

bound to derail security best practices put in place by IT administrators. In fact, unfettered

BYOD is known to be a recipe for “Bring your own Disaster!”

I wanted to touch upon BYOD as it is customary to do in any mention of enterprise mobility; in

future though it will merely be a part of a larger strategic initiative. I will leave it at that.

Today, EMM tools act as a Swiss-army knife in the hands of IT administrators. It provides

multiple and diverse advantages both for the organization and the employee. Employees are

guaranteed secure and real-time access to corporate information, be it in the form of email,

applications or content and organizations benefit from the control they can exercise over end-

users’ devices that are trying to access that data.

What does the future look like?

Will security issues continue to haunt IT administrators? Yes, it could very well. Though, security

will become part of the plumbing layer that enables and encompasses various mobility

functions. Ensuring security of corporate data and privacy of user information is central to the

success of any mobility initiative and needless to say, it has to be addressed and made

compliant with existing or new standards. But we cannot hold our future hostage to the paranoia

surrounding security and privacy issues. Let’s assume it’s a problem not big enough to hinder

the growth of enterprise mobility. I say this with confidence because a decade ago, any thought

of moving to the cloud (Amazons and the Azures of the day) was ‘clouded’ by privacy concerns.

Better sense prevailed. The advantages of SaaS, IaaS and PaaS became so self-evident that a

phrase like “Mobile-first, cloud-first” or “Mobile-cloud era” is no longer considered taboo. We are

still haunted by the occasional security breaches with incidents like the iCloud data breach, but I

view them only as growing pains.

Going forward, we will use the terms ‘device’ and ‘machine’ interchangeably.

I was recently watching a documentary on “Man vs Machine” in relation to the chess match

between Garry Kasparov and the IBM Deep Blue and there were questions being raised if a

machine can stake claim to have triumphed the human potential. Sure it can. And someday we

might become tools put into use by “intelligent” machines. But here’s how it concluded and I

paraphrase it as follows - the machine was after all conceived and invented by a figment of

human imagination, so it’s ultimately a triumph of mankind over itself.

I digress, but you get a sense of where we are going.

Empowered mobility management in lieu of Enterprise Mobility Management

As thought leaders, we should start referring to EMM as “Empowered” Mobility Management

because you will no longer be able to draw a line between personal and enterprise devices

anymore – it just doesn’t matter. Empowered mobility management makes the machine more

self-aware, ambient-aware and context-aware.

The word “enterprise” gets dropped from now on. And what I am suggesting is not far from the

truth. The machine, apps and data are not just tools in the hands of the end-user, but become

empowered entities that seek to complement human abilities of its owner. In fact, intelligent

mobile devices will blur the distinction between the device and the device owner.

A case in point – auto-reply in emails could become so “intelligent” someday through machine

learning that the recipient will not recognize the difference between an email app responding on

your behalf or you typing the message. By the same token, an email app recognizes that its

user hasn’t checked it since morning – so it defaults to auto-pilot mode and runs through an

“escalation rule engine”. It tries to alert the user first. On getting no response to the stimulus, the

app sends a message to a user who he last communicated with or a user with whom he

communicates the most. The email app can take recourse to seeking medical help if it doesn’t

get any response. As you can see, the device and its owner take on interchanging roles of

ownership – so there’s nothing called “Device ownership” anymore. It just doesn’t matter.

How Empowered Mobility Management can transform enterprise search

Empowered Mobility management enables the intelligent use of search as well. Search today is

all synchronous. The results you see on your search-results page is the result of what the

search-engine thinks is the most relevant answer to your query. What if there was a better

answer available two, three, ten days from now? The search capabilities in enterprise content

systems for instance need to become more intelligent and push results to these devices as

more relevant and new information becomes available. It’s as if by searching for specific

information, you are enrolling into an auto-subscription for more information as it’s discovered.

How Empowered Mobility Management can be a productivity boost

Empowered Mobility management takes on the role of a productivity tool – instead of an IT

administrator blacklisting social networking apps on managed devices, devices can be

configured to block social apps when say for instance, a user is approaching addiction-levels of

social browsing.

How Empowered Mobility Management can help with graceful degradation of apps

Empowered Mobility management can play a huge role in keeping a check on telecom

expenses – again it doesn’t matter whether cost savings concern the employee or the corporate.

Most apps depend on mobile data usage in real-time. We have no way of setting upper limits on

data usage at an application level. If we could, it would allow for graceful degradation of apps

based on their business criticality. As of today, it’s either all or none - either all apps have

access to the allocated 1 GB of data usage limit or none have. In future, we could have a

system where apps start to fall off the threshold of their limits and business critical apps like

Inbox can be the “last-man-standing”.

EMM means different things depending on whom you ask

A broad definition of Enterprise Mobility Management that is equally valid across verticals is akin

to asking for a generic meaning of life! It doesn’t make sense because it means different things

to different people.

Empowered Mobility Management flipping the classroom in schools

EMM in schools helps teachers and students relate better to each other. It helps teachers to

teach concepts using multimedia friendly devices and at the same time ensuring students stay

focused by creating a distraction-free environment on the device. This would not have been

possible without the EMM software providers enabling the school’s IT administration with the

right tools and ‘empowering’ both their teachers and students.

Use of digital devices in classrooms is here to stay and the idea of “flip the classroom” is a

vision that EMM tools can transform into reality.

Empowered Mobility Management can enable better healthcare to the masses

EMM in healthcare provides a platform for doctors; paramedics and patients to have real-time

information about a patient. It also enables real-time communication between the computer

systems in hospitals and a doctor’s phone by leveraging the ability to collect and interpret data

received from sensors attached to a patient. These sensors need not be attached directly to a

patient’s body. EMM will provide the ability to not only manage smartphones but any device

connected to it via Bluetooth, Bluetooth LE, NFC or Wifi-Direct thereby, potentially managing

data from the “internet of daisy-chained devices”. So that leads us to the next big thing – the

“internet of things” (IoT).

Synergy between IoT and EMM

I will not delve into the IoT in abstract terms. IoT assumes paramount significance in the context

of Enterprise mobility considering the synergy between IoT and EMM. Think of the profound

impact we can have – EMM provides the ability to remotely configure, track, manage and view a

connected device and connected devices can relay the real-time data back to EMM systems.

Not only can we build rules that will highlight any anomalies in the data received but also

combine it with big data analytics. As you can imagine, we can have very interesting use cases.

For instance, spread of diseases can be traced back to its origin in a matter of seconds.

A patient can be notified of an anomaly with his heart-rate via an alert even before he reports

symptoms of a cardiac arrest to his doctor. Imagine how life-saving and timely such an alert can

be to a patient and his family. If the alert is considered life-threatening, the patient’s family-

doctor can be notified instantly as well.

Concept of Ad hoc MDMs

The problem with (Mobile Device Management) MDM today esp. with the way Apple MDM

supports it is you can have only one MDM profile installed on your device. What does it mean?

It means you can only have one controlling authority for a device – which makes sense anyway

you’d say. Two controlling authorities can wreak havoc if they have conflicting restrictions.

But in the scenario where I walk into a restaurant and I want to have ad hoc menus pushed to

my device or let’s say I enter a seminar hall and the presenter wants to push down the

presentation to all phones and prompt users to put their phones on mute, we currently don’t

have a way of pushing down ad hoc “profiles” or “managed” apps and content.

That’s something the future beckons.

Open Standards

If there’s one reason the internet was a technological phenomenon, it was because the various

networks agreed on open standards - a common protocol stack (TCP/IP) that allowed them to

talk to each other. If we are to realize the true potential of the benefits of enterprise mobility and

the IoT, we have no option but to have software and hardware vendors agree on common

standards and develop technologies that are interoperable. There’s a reason why standards

bodies like 3GPP, ANSI, W3C, ITU, OMA, IEEE and the IETF exist. Software companies have

to look beyond parochial interests and work together so we can grow the ecosystem. When the

ecosystem grows, the market grows and a growing market is good for the entire industry.

Formats like JPG, MP3, MP4 and protocols like http(s) are universally accepted today.

Does it come as a surprise that the ubiquitous USB drive expands to “Universal” Serial Bus?

I strongly believe in the idea of providing interoperability between protocols and technologies by

means of software and hardware adaptors. I do realize that at times, we cannot afford to drag

down future innovation just to conform to the average mediocrity of the current day. However, I

would like to caution that any such move towards a non-standard approach in the guise of

breakthrough innovation should ensure a “faster, higher and stronger” means to accomplishing

a given task as opposed to being only a cosmetic differentiation with the sole intention of a

vendor lock-in. If Blink is the new WebKit, its aim has to be to make WebKit 10x faster!

“Standardize on protocol and compete on value-proposition” – this is my ask from EMM vendors

and OEMs for the collective benefit of the industry and our customers.

Open standards between OEMs will ensure I can move from one platform to another much like

we switch between telecom carriers when we move from country to country. We don’t

necessarily buy a new mobile device! Truly speaking, continuity and handoff should extend

beyond platforms from the same vendor. Why should continuity be restricted between a

Chromebook and an Android phone or a MacBook and an iPhone? If we are serious about the

internet of things – we better adhere to the principles on which the internet itself was founded.

APIs and SDKs

The future of enterprise mobility will cease to be a solution from a single vendor. Customers

should be able to leverage APIs and SDKs from multiple vendors and build their own custom

workflows. It’s impossible for any single, best-of-breed solution to meet the expectations of the

growing needs of every customer across every vertical. APIs and SDKs will help customers to

fill any missing gaps that exist in the products available off the shelf.

Future EMM systems to make Platform and Device type redundant

Most EMM solutions today are evaluated and benchmarked by checking features off a list of

supported platforms and device types. Here’s the radically new approach that we should see in

the coming years – Devices will broadcast a “capability-set”. We can support any device based

on its capabilities. So really speaking, it will cease to be a question of "whether vendor X

supports device Y", the more important question is whether vendor X supports a capability and

all devices with that capability will be auto-supported. This is especially true in the age of the

internet of things – it’d be ridiculous to say we support light bulbs, alarm clocks, toasters and

microwave ovens as distinct device types. Rather, devices support the capability of staying

‘connected’ and being reached via an URI and EMM systems make use of this capability to

address these devices.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, suffice it to say that the meaning of Enterprise Mobility Management and its impact

will vary depending on how we plan to leverage its potential. Again, it’s not management of end

users’ devices that matters, but the empowerment of its users that matters in the end.