Gaining a clear understanding of how your employees use their corporate smartphones, is the first critical step to developing an effective mobile strategy and for generating substantial mobile network and device savings.
Data Is Essential For Your Business Mobile Strategy
By mapping mobile voice, SMS and mobile data usage against devices and users, it is possible to clearly visualise how employee devices are really used in large organisations. We call this process “Heat Mapping”, and it enables CIOs to better understand the different user “personas” that exist across their mobile estate.
This data can then be used as a starting point for identifying different technologies, services and policies that can be considered to help reduce costs, free up IT resource, reduce IT’s carbon footprint and to improve the end-user mobile experience.
Analysis across our customers indicates that users with a corporate issued smartphone with a consistently low level of traditional mobile voice usage are also more likely to own their own personal smartphone. These users also tend to use much less mobile data on their corporate SIM.
By contrast, users with a corporate issued smartphone that exhibit higher levels of voice usage, also tend to be the highest users of mobile data services and more often than not, also rely on that device for both work and personal use instead of owning a personal smartphone.
Employee Usage Data Is Key To Reducing Unnecessary Investment
Whilst it might be expected that users with lower levels of voice usage did so because they had switched to communicating via MS Teams or other collaboration tools (which use mobile data instead of traditional mobile minutes), the analysis instead suggests that with new working practices, these users are simply using their corporate issued mobile devices much less frequently.
Furthermore, through end-user engagement surveys and by educating users on how new technologies (like MS Mobile Application Management) can provide users with secure access to corporate apps like email on their personal phone without impacting their privacy, then this group of infrequent users are often more open to using their own device for work and foregoing their corporate device.
Final Thoughts
By taking the time to understand the mobile usage data in their own organisation and by engaging with end-users, CIOs can more readily identify relevant services and policies that can be combined to create a small ‘portfolio’ of device, connectivity and mobile support options that are best aligned to these user needs. Helping to reduce unnecessary device investment, improving RoI on IT budgets and improving the end-user experience compared to traditional “one size fits all” corporate mobile offerings.
You can find out more about strategic cost savings for your business smartphones, tablets and laptops on our pages Business Mobile Contract Negotiations and Strategic Mobile Cost Management.
Strategic Mobile Device Logistics
Interested in understanding your own corporate mobile usage in more detail? Get in touch to arrange a no obligation Discovery Meeting.
