Make Your Internal Operations Mobile
Internal operations such as HR and Legal have yet to fully capitalize on the potential of mobile services.
Legal Department
Take the Legal department, for example. Surveys find that 76% of legal staff are bringing their own mobile devices to work, and 26% of lawyers carry mobile devices with them when they travel. They should: it turns out 40% of law firms expect lawyers to be available for messaging at any time. In addition, lawyers are using mobile devices for reading documents, including legal briefs and reference material.16 New mobile apps are replacing the law books and binders of notes that lawyers used to have to carry to trial.
In law, data security is essential. Electronic matter that is accidentally disclosed is at risk of losing client-attorney privilege.
Lawyers and their staff would benefit from secure file storage solutions that support messaging and annotations. They could use micro-blogging-like activity streams to stay on top of fast-breaking news and planning. Centralised access control and monitoring would enable IT administrators and compliance officers to ensure that only authorised users gain access to files.
Human Resources
Like Legal departments, HR departments count on confidentiality. They routinely manage sensitive data such as healthcare information, contracts and salary information, employee disputes, and details for mergers and acquisitions.
As its name suggests, human resources involves people and lots of face-to-face conversations. Laptops and tablets configured with secure access to secure file lockers enable HR team members to travel from office to office, meeting with managers and workers while keeping critical data close at hand.
Make Your External Operations Mobile
Enterprises have high hopes for mobilizing their external operations. The Accenture study mentioned earlier found that for 44% of organizations, opening new sales and marketing channels was a major priority for mobile initiatives. Another 39% were striving to improve field/service and customer service delivery through mobile technology.
How would a mobile-ready enterprise help its marketing, sales, and customer service teams?
By enabling them to collaborate, communicate, and share files quickly and easily on any kind of device. Here are some examples.
Sales
A sales representative has landed at the airport and is driving to meet an important client to close a major deal. While the sales rep has been stuck on a plane, the RFP team at headquarters has been polishing the company’s proposal and updating the presentation slides with the latest competitive data. They post the files to a secure file sharing service accessible to all authorized users. By annotating the files and providing comments in a threaded message forum, they can ensure that the sales rep understands the latest changes, even if they never have the chance to catch him on the phone and explain
their work.
When late-breaking news about a customer endorsement arrives moments before the meeting, they can post a message about the endorsement to the folder being used for the presentation.
The secure file sharing service puts all kind of files at the sales representative’s fingertips: everything from Word documents to presentations to videos to CAD/CAM drawings.
