It’s a different world today.  Business can be conducted in airports while waiting for a flight, on conference calls that seamlessly move the conversation from your office phone to cell phone, or at home on a laptop that is securely connected to your communications environment.  Consumers and employees want to stay connected and want the ability to retrieve information and communicate on their mobile devices.  The ability to retrieve information and communicate anytime, from anywhere has become more than a “nice to have.”

A well planned mobility strategy is a journey towards providing the right type of access to information to the various stakeholders within an organization regardless of device or network.  The various levels of mobility provide varying degrees of flexibility and extendibility of the information.  A solid IT strategy is important for a company to achieve its vision and be successful.  A company’s business and IT strategies must be dynamic and adapt to competitive pressure and opportunities.

With these new opportunities comes a host of challenges, including device selection, applications manageability, and security that must be addressed to meet user requirements and align them to the evolution of seamless mobility capabilities.  Additionally, there can be organizational related challenges such as organizational silos, lack of or outdated strategic plans, mismatch or lack of internal skill required to support the emerging mobility capabilities, and an incomplete characterization of the mobile workforce.  With multiple dynamics at play, combined with rapidly advancing technology that enables even greater efficiency and productivity, a mobility strategy is an essential part of strategic plan to ensure competitive success.

Strategic Mobility Planning

Effective planning, architecture definition, and road-mapping are critical to the successful deployment of a mobility solution.  Thoroughly understanding the various user requirements and the variability applications and devices requires thoughtful research and planning before embarking on a mobility implementation.

In order to manage and enhance the mobility, VDN has identified five technical areas that must be assessed and addressed:

• Experience Architecture: Maintaining the personalized look and feel of the communication (content) while addressing the changes in the underlying environment.
• Context: Sensing and adapting the experience to deliver optimized performance and reliability based on the user’s context, application, and preferences.
• Security: Ensuring end-to-end security control and continuity.
• Manageability: Managing and measuring the user experience.
• Connectivity: Providing the technical environment capable of delivering the required level of mobility.

VDN’s Methodology

Creating a successful mobility strategy requires execution of a well-defined process backed by strong corporate support and sponsorship as well as participation from representatives across all functional areas of the organization.

The culmination of this strategy effort is the creation of an actionable plan and roadmap to implement and rollout the mobility vision.  The action plan consists of a set of activities organized and defined as business, operations, system or technical.  Each action will be documented as a high level statement of work, describing the findings upon which the action is based; the recommended action to resolve the finding, and concerns and risk associated with the action.  The roadmap is then developed with defined time-lines based on items such as effort, criticality, budget, technology availability, and adoption time frame.

Why VDN?

VDN understands that effective planning and strategic development for a successful mobility strategy that meets today’s needs and is scalable for the future requires clear understanding of the vision, gaps, architecture and roadmap to get you there.  VDN understands that communications networks are changing business in fundamental ways.  Our core practices of IP telephony, enterprise networking, contact center, and unified communications, collaboration and applications integration are aligned with the challenges faced by business today and are focused on making people more productive, customer’s more loyal, and organizations more efficient, while underpinning everything we do on ensuring the reach, capability, and resilience of our customers communications networks.  VDN is committed to designing and managing solutions that overcome business challenges and create sustainable value.