Why you should embrace the cost of mobile

Vendors love to scare IT over security, control, and cost issues, and the rise of modern mobile devices in the workplace — whether BYOD or corporate-issued — is a favorite whipping boy from vendors whose answer to all ills is, of course, to buy their products. Though the vendors’ warnings jeopardize their own “spiraling costs” claims, anything goes in sales, right?

A closer look at the numbers reveals why so many corporate managers have told IT to get out of the way when it comes to mobile: Its adoption boosts the bottom line — even when you spend more to try to control it. By my calculations, you get 10 to 25 times the return for every dollar you spend. That’s a no-brainer in support of mobile adoption. And you’ll get better ROI if you take the next step and think about investing in mobile proactively, not simply trying to manage (read: control) it.

The economics of mobile management Take a recent report by Azaleos, which resells the AirWatch mobile device management (MDM) product. It noted that IT labor costs for supporting mobile users were expected to rise to about $339 per year per user in 2013, as companies implemented MDM or expanded the number of supported platforms and capabilities in their MDM tools rather than rely on just the included mobile management services in Microsoft Exchange (which cost $229 per user per year to manage in 2011, according to the Azaleos report). Another MDM vendor fond of scaremongering, BoxTone, claims the IT labor cost is $555 per user per year, near half of which is allegedly for support calls. 

That sounds like a shocking cost increase, doesn’t it? Never mind that the labor cost increase claimed by Azaleos is driven solely by IT deciding it wants more control over mobile devices, not from user actions. Plus, the same report says companies are already spending $294 per user this year, thanks to increased MDM adoption, so the projected delta isn’t as large as the report highlights depict.

Add in the cost of the MDM licenses, which range from $60 to $180 per user per year. Assume you also pay the data plans for half your users — people in jobs that truly require mobile access, such as sales and field support — to add another $360 per user per year for generous data plans ($60 of data per user for that half of your user base whose data you pay for). Figure an employer subsidy on the devices every two years for half the employees; that’s another $75 per user per year on average ($300 per employee whose data you pay for). That’s a grand total of $834 to $954 per user per year. If you believe BoxTone’s mobile support cost claims, which I do not, that cost rises to $1,084 to $1,204 per user. Keep in mind: BoxTone likes to use worst-case examples as its norm for all employees, and it favors selling its expensive support management tools over cheaper, more effective methods like user training and higher proportion of self-responsibility for user-chosen technology.

Now factor in another recent report from Good Technology that shows the average mobile employee works 7 hours per week more (unpaid) than employees not provided mobile access to email and other work resources. That’s 30 hours per month of free labor, or 336 hours per year — assuming they don’t work via mobile over the 10 typical holidays or 10 typical vacation days they get each year, which of course they do. Figure an hourly labor cost average of $40 outside the big cities, and companies get $13,440 in free labor per user each year that costs them between $834 and — perhaps in poorly run companies — $1,204 per year in mobile device, data, and management costs. That labor cost can easily triple in many locales, making the ROI of mobile much greater than my conservative assumptions here.

These are just the hard costs. The soft benefits such as improved customer and supply chain satisfaction and greater operational efficiency add value as well. There are soft costs, too, such as the possibly heightened risk of data breaches as more corporate information is moved onto mobile devices and cloud services that may not be as locked down as Windows PCs can be made to be. I say “possibly” because despite all the fearmongering by security vendors, I’ve yet to see real data on the incidents or costs of security intrusions and data breaches attributable to mobile device usage — believe me, I’ve been asking for such data — which tells me the actual risk doesn’t support the vendors’ fear-oriented claims.

Yes, your costs will vary, but no matter what they are, you’ll still come out ahead — unless you lock down mobile devices so much that people don’t use them, as some security pros would prefer. Nonuse is always the best security method.

Using mobile management to get even more out of mobile If you pay attention to most vendors, the be-all, end-all of mobile management is MDM, a “no” technology approach that limits what users can do and access. There’s definitely a need to manage information, but MDM is a blunt instrument that should be part of a more nuanced, policy-oriented management framework.

Users work around “no” technologies; they work with “yes” technologies. I know many IT people don’t believe this, thinking users have no choice but to accept the prison IT has built for them. But users have a choice. Consider this example a consultant relayed: One large company bought 13,000 MDM licenses to impose strict controls on its BYOD users. All but 800 BYOD users disconnected from the corporate environment, no longer using their mobile devices for work. After all, they were working on their dime and on their time, yet the company penalized them for it. Not only did that free labor disappear, but surely several thousand of them set up autoforwarding of corporate email to personal accounts so that they could continue to work at their convenience, IT be damned.

A recent survey by access-management vendor MokaFive showed another problem with the “no” approach to mobile management: intrusive snooping on and control over employees. In fact, 77 percent of IT pros — not users, but the very people who would implement the policies — surveyed said they strongly disliked MDM due to this police-state approach. They used words like “violated” to describe how they felt. This police-state usage is a recipe for widespread flouting of mobile management policies, even legitimate ones.

One intriguing “yes” technology for mobile is Visage Mobile’s MobilityCentral product. At first blush, it looks like an old-fashioned telecom expense management tool, identifying unused data plans, spotting unusual overages, and the like. That would be of interest only to accounting people, but it’s much more. MobilityCentral treats mobile plans and devices holistically from a budgeting perspective, so managers can see the actual costs of their employees’ mobile plans — both the ones the company pays for and, depending on your expense reporting software, what the employees are having reimbursed. It also can track devices and plans as they move from person to person, such as for shift work or hand-me-down devices.

OK, so budgetary management sounds like something only an accountant would care about, but that’s a shortsighted reaction. “Six months into it, we see people get past the budget compliance activities to seeing patterns of user activity for talent management and for device and communications strategy,” says CEO Bzur Haun.

In other words, by understanding where and how users and groups of users (such as by role or location or department) actually work with mobile devices and mobile access, companies can encourage the behavior they want and discourage the behavior they don’t, through adjusting the economics. Dashboards let managers see the patterns for their group, and employees can be given access to their patterns.

Most employees and managers have no idea what they’re spending or doing with mobile, so they can’t act responsibly when it comes to cost management or tailor their mobile strategies to what is actually useful for their work and department. The MobilityCentral dashboards change that.

Such empowerment through information is an approach alien to many companies that centralize expense reporting and hide from employees and departmental managers the gory details until something really goes amiss. But it should be the norm: If employees and managers don’t understand or can’t even see the implications of their decisions, how do you expect them to make the best choices?

When someone in your company freaks out about the “high” costs of mobile (especially those who also want to impose costly control mechanisms on mobile users), let them know they’re being penny-wise and pound-foolish. It’s clear the actual costs of mobile enablement are small, and the benefits are huge, especially if you go beyond a control mentality.

This article, “Why you should embrace the cost of mobile,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.