Making the right Managed Mobile Service choice

As mobility becomes ever more critical for businesses, as does the need for outsourcing Mobile Mobility Services (MMS). But equally important, is ensuring you take the rights steps when looking to outsource, as not doing so sees a 50% chance of failure due to hidden costs and poorly defined vendor responsibilities.

While this may seem a daunting figure, the alternative of having an unmanaged mobile estate without structure, control or transparency can be much scarier. It cannot only inhibit productivity, and expose security risks such as data leaks, but can also create unnecessarily high costs across multiple departments, as well as a whole world of headaches.

It looks good, but is that MMS right for you?   

Sourcing the right MMS isn’t child’s play, but it also isn’t rocket science. Unless of course, you’re in the business of making rockets. What it does require though, is due diligence across cost, risk and enterprise values. To help ensure you make the right choice, you should;

• Create realistic total cost objectives by completing a full analysis of the internal costs of managing your own mobile estate, including facility management. Then compare this with offers from your potential MMS vendors.
• Let vendors know exactly what you want to be delivered, how, when, and by whom.
• Clearly define your goals and the processes you want to see put into place and communicate how you’re going to be measuring these.

Avoiding a crouching TCO and hidden costs.

To avoid getting caught out by a low estimation and hidden costs, it is essential to have full visibility of the entire internal costs up front, as that will serve as a starting point for comparison. You just need to figure out how far and wide costs are spread across your business, as many internal management systems cover multiple departments. Once this has been done, the next steps are to;

• Ensure a vendor provides their full cost of implementation, as well as migration and integration. Including the need for consolidation across PC’s, mobile devices and wearables. Sourcing like for like inventory if a supplier is out. Integration between platforms, as well as end-user training and support during and after the rollout.
• Thoroughly evaluate exactly what your subscription includes. Ensure the MMS portfolio meets your requirements and ensure there are no gaps are left in the service compared to what you’re expecting.

Making sure everyone is happy.  

Within an organisation, your new MMS platform needs to be fully understood by everyone and not just key stakeholders. A clear understanding of objectives and outcomes should be clearly communicated to all. This reinforces the importance of receiving a detailed description of what and how services will be delivered, and by when, and by whom. According to Gartner, an effective MMS deal also requires:

• A comprehensive technical service-level agreement (SLA).  
• Easily accessible details related to the implementation of the solution.
• An understanding of the role, cost and proactivity of an account manager and service management team.
• Details of how granular the reporting will be.
• Descriptions of what management the provider is adding to the resell of partner software for expense management.
• Clear documenting of all the operational processes.
• An explicit governance model that covers the provider and its partners.

Keeping it real.

To over-deliver on expectations and under-deliver on misunderstanding and disappointment, you must make results accessible to all key stakeholders. It’s important to remember that while some results speak for themselves, others will need to be tangible such as an end-user customer satisfaction metric.

To validate operational quality, you should:

• Clarify with internal stakeholders what the ideal business outcomes are.
• Agree how and when performance will be measured.
• Ensure all relevant documentation avoids vague or easily misinterpreted wording.

Utilising this planned and detailed approach, you and your company should be able to sidestep any potential troubles with vendor based MMS solutions.

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