Understanding the TCO of Enterprise Mobility

Mobility is a pet project for most enterprises today. They are investing in the idea of making their applications and business processes mobile. Both the customer and employee interfaces to the business and IT functions are undergoing transformation to fit on the brightly lit, smaller size screens of smart devices. There are many security and operational complexity challenges that mobilization brings for IT to handle. However, there the business also faces a challenge trying to justify the business case of mobility. The ROI calculations don’t live up to the expectations because firstly, the returns might not all be tangible benefits, and secondly, the Total cost of ownership (TCO) calculation is complex to say the least.

The cost of mobilization of your enterprise has many components, many of which are missed or incorrectly calculated when determining the TCO. The list below can be used as a guideline for the different costs that go into the mobility initiatives.

1. Capital Expenditure – CAPEX is the upfront, usually one time expenditure that must be incurred by the enterprise. The CAPEX elements of mobility are

Device – The first cost of the mobility initiative is the cost of the devices themselves. This can either be borne by the enterprise, or transferred to the employees (BYOD). The financial responsibility is an easier challenge to tackle. However, the legal responsibility and the security concerns are a different story altogether.

Batteries and Spares – The devices will malfunction, be lost or get stolen. The peripherals like batteries and chargers, along with the extra devices need to be made available to ensure continued productivity of people. However, this is required only under the Enterprise owned, or COPE (corporate owned personally enabled) device models.

Software – Along with the devices, you need to have applications, security software, and latest patches for the device OS. These may or may not have an associated cost, but definitely need to be considered. There are MDM solutions, MEAP, and other enterprise software you will need to purchase, and its not cheap.

Upgrades – Device upgrades, software upgrades, and internal application upgrades to support the mobile interfaces need to be planned and budgeted.

WLAN – Wireless LAN may need to be enabled at corporate or branch offices in order to provide secure access to internal applications. This has an associated hardware and software cost.

2. Operational Expenditure – OPEX is the recurring cost of running the services to support mobility. The cost items under this head are listed below.

Software delivery and deployment mechanism – In order to provide access to the users to enterprise mobile applications, there has to be a distribution mechanism. This could either be an enterprise app store, or the commercial store available to the public. Either way, the software distribution mechanism will lead to some costs that will need to be planned for. There will also be the cost of the teams managing the deployment of the apps.

Application support and maintenance – A team required for bug fixes, upgrades, performance tuning and other support and development activities will cost money. This team has to be integrated with the internal IT operations like the IT help desk to have the users call into a single number in case of an issue.

Security and access management – Most mobile interfaces will interact with the internal systems. Therefore, the communication channels need to be secured and encrypted. Also, the account management and access control for authorized devices and users needs to be implemented and managed, requiring software and effort.

Others – Other cost elements to consider are – User training, user helpdesk, auditing and compliance, asset and configuration management.