When a Good Mobility Idea Becomes a Management Nightmare - Part 4

[Former Member]

Previous Posts in this series have outlined definitions and characteristics of point solutions and MADP solutions. The previous posts in this blog series includes:

• When a Good Mobility Idea Becomes a Management Nightmare - Part 1
• When a Good Mobility Idea Becomes a Management Nightmare - Part 2
• When a Good Mobility Idea Becomes a Management Nightmare - Part 3

Today's discussion will focus on when a MADP solution makes business sense.

Point solutions provide mobile applications to a small group of employees quickly and at low cost. As more people use them and more point solutions are deployed in the enterprise, they become difficult to manage, and they can restrict operational workflow. At what point does a MADP solution make better business sense?

The illustration to the right shows that a break point occurs at about 150 users or 3 mobile applications.

We have also found that management costs rise sharply when an organization supports two or more mobile device operating systems. At this point, the cost of managing and maintaining point solutions exceeds the cost of managing and maintaining a MADP-based infrastructure supporting a similar set of users or applications.

However there is a larger issue that speaks directly to the operational effectiveness of mobility in the organization.

Transformative mobility refers to how business mobility changes the way an organization operates. For instance, with business mobility it becomes possible to make more manufacturing, marketing, and sales decisions based on real-time data. Business processes accelerate and become more accurate.

The more deeply mobility penetrates an organization, the more opportunity that organization has to transform its business processes. The cost of an organization’s mobility solution can be high if it adopts, implements, and rolls out a few point solutions only to find they are inadequate for the organization’s rapidly growing mobility needs. Given the current trends in enterprise mobility, the key question may not be when a MADP solution makes sense, but if a point solution makes sense at all.

If you are looking to learn more about MADP solutions and specifically the SAP Mobile Platform, I suggest you check out the SAP Mobile Platform: Webinars on Enterprise Readiness.

The topics in the webinar series include:

• Enterprise Scale Mobility
• Life Cycle Management
• Performance
• Security
• Supportability