The Mobile Users’ Bill of Rights

In the “mobile” enterprise of yesteryear, the thinking in the IT department used to be: Let’s give everyone a terminal on their desk, and when someone goes on the road, they can borrow one of the laptops. It seems incredible today, but I’m old enough to remember working under this very policy, and I also remember the disappointment when I needed to travel and someone else had just gotten the last laptop – and the acoustic couplers!

Today, to risk a gross understatement, technology has changed. But has your thinking? Be honest. When it comes to providing your organization’s people with the productivity tools they need, do you think office first and mobile second?

If you do, you’re probably at odds with the majority of your organization’s people. The number of employees who work from home is increasing constantly. After all, how many times have you been on a call and the there’s a dog barking in the background?

So be a realist. Try looking at things from your people’s point of view. They don’t want much, they just want:

o To work wherever they are.

o To work whenever they want.

o To never worry about bandwidth.

o To never worry about security.

o To use their own devices.

o To work with fun, consumer-like apps

Are these things really too much to ask? If you’re in IT you might think so, but if you’re a user, this is your bill of rights. Instead of thinking of mobility services as favors to be doled out, think of them as your baseline for enabling workforce productivity.

To meet these demands, you’ve got to start by supporting the most popular personal devices, including smart phones, tablets and laptops. Gartner has predicted that by 2017, employees will own half the devices used in the workplace. Then you need to make sure your people have the applications and data they need to use on those devices. Then you need to manage the devices, the applications and the data.

Rather than patching together a bunch of disparate technologies, it makes sense to go with a solution that was conceived with just this set of requirements in mind.

That would be Citrix Workspace Suite. It’s designed to let you enable people to be productive while protecting critical data. Your users get what they want. You get what you want. And the dog can bark all it wants.