Blog: How Can I Optimize My Mobile Devices?
Mobile Insights is a series of educational blogs by B2M Solutions that explains the fundamentals of mobile device analytics and how the technology can be used to help mobile devices and their users work more efficiently. This blog explains how to evolve from managing mobile devices to optimizing them, by using mobile device analytics.
The traditional and accepted way for organizations to care for the mobile devices that their workers use is to monitor them through a mobile device management (MDM) system and provide troubleshooting as necessary, typically when the support desk gets a call with a problem. This approach is common and millions of devices are managed this way every day. But managing devices is quite different to optimizing them.
Whilst device management is perfect to configure devices with Gold Build settings, perform over the air updates and wipe devices remotely if they get lost or stolen they don’t provide the visibility business needs to proactively prevent problems, improve device performance and enhance the user and customer experience. They also tend to provide reporting on what has happened to devices whereas mobile analytics monitors devices in real time and provides instant alerts to issues so the support desk can resolve them, often before the device user even knows they have an issue.
The good news is that mobile systems administrators don’t need more effort to switch from device management to device optimization. What they need is different information, which comes from a different tool – mobile device analytics. Here is some guidance about how mobile device analytics can optimize your device estate.
Improve software performance & prevent issues:
Mobile device analytics can identify conflicts among applications, alert administrators to application irregularities before they escalate to reboots, identify applications that are not actively being used but are consuming resources, and identify unauthorized user-installed applications. They can also provide utilization data to help optimise performance of the software portfolio.
Reduce connectivity problems:
Mobile device analytics can alert administrators to connectivity issues so they can take action to prevent its loss in the future before it affects other users. Mobile device analytics solutions can also report data use across the estate sending alerts when limits are breached and helping organizations to adjust business processes for different coverage zones to minimise connectivity issues and data usage. It can also help to identify the root cause of the issue, such as network, software or hardware component problems.
Increase device utilisation & reduce spares costs:
Optimizing the size of the mobile device population is one of the most effective ways to optimize costs. It is typical for 30 percent of an organizations’ mobile devices to be unused on any given day.[i] See our blog post Optimizing your mobile devices to improve your ROI to learn more about how mobile device analytics can help you optimize your device estate.
Prevent battery failures:
Mobile device analytics prevent battery-related device failures in several ways. For example, a mobile device analytics solution can flag a device (or devices) that is rapidly losing its charge. It could go beyond basic alerting by informing the administrator the reason the battery was draining, perhaps for example because a GPS-driven app was running in the background. That added insight gives administrators the information they need to fix the issue on the device, and on any others in the device population that may be in the same circumstance. Mobile analytics also shows trends to show the health of batteries across the estate so that a replacement program can be put into place before users start to feel the effects of poor performance.
We’ll have more on using analytics to improve battery performance and power management in an upcoming blog.
Mobile device analytics are diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. With mobile device analytics, administrators can spend time optimizing their mobile device populations instead of fixing them. Optimization results in faster performance, a better user experience, increased productivity, longer device life and a greater return on the overall mobility investment.
[i] Based on an analysis of B2M customer support data.