The advent of the Smartphone and connected tablet are creating new opportunities to push staff out of the office to interact directly with the public.
Huge productivity gains beckon as the need to take notes and return to home base to enter data evaporates. Staff can now connect to their applications on the fly and citizens gain instant satisfaction.
So the connected workforce in its most simple format leads to happier people, a better balance sheet and more satisfied staff – what could possibly be wrong with this?
One of the possible flies, is that organisations looking to adopt Smartphone’s and tablets can expect exponential growth in their data consumption, and CFO’s are rightly concerned that they are exposed to burgeoning costs.
So how do you manage network costs? Broadly speaking there are two options in the market.
Managed model
Work with a partner who can provide you with fine grained control that allows you to forecast and optimise individual usage, provide split billing (for personal use), apply policies, and limit access to business applications. This allows you to negotiate on usage, manage your costs and only pay for what you use, as costs drop over time you will realise the benefit of this trend.
You need a partner who has the tools and organisations will need to invest in capability or outsource the management function. Over the long term you will have an improved cost model and a better understanding of your mobile environment but will lose cost certainty.
Shared use model
This model absconds from detail to look at organisational demand, average utilisation across the organisation with a fixed cost per device across voice, text and data for a period (typically 3-6 months and multi-annum is possible). The beauty of the model is its simplicity and typically includes a much larger ‘bucket’ to allow growth in the use of their mobiles – costs are fixed but the sting is in the tail, if use is not managed the next rate review might see a large increase in cost. Conversely if you don’t grow your mobile usage fast enough you might have spent money on unused capacity.
Gen-i can work with either model and our experience in the market shows that you must manage your mobile fleet and possess a mobile strategy to have a hope of controlling costs and gaining benefits from mobility. Broadly speaking the managed model better contains costs and can lead to cost savings but requires a focused effort.
Organisations that do not want or don’t have the ability to focus find the shared use model much more manageable and this model is also appropriate for organisations who need cost certainty over longer periods especially if their mobile strategy will lead to unpredictable growth of data use.
Finally, when making purchasing decisions for your organisation make sure it’s an apples to apples comparison – at surface level a managed model can appear complex and costly but a full TCO analysis generally demonstrates lower costs over term than shared use.
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