Agile working is all about creating a flexible and productive work environment. This includes delivering applications that allow your people to work anywhere, and sometimes any way, they choose. This can be challenging from an application perspective because some legacy systems are not very mobile friendly. However, for some firms the increase in adoption of cloud services has enhanced agile work practices. Cloud applications are more mobile friendly and while cloud services should be approached and considered with caution, selecting the right provider can also improve the mobility and flexibility of your applications. Another consideration is how do you protect data that has been downloaded to a mobile device? If your applications are mobile then device and data management must be addressed if you are going to take advantage of the mobility features.
If you are migrating your applications to cloud services then it makes sense to also look at a cloud authentication and identity management platform. A cloud authentication platform can manage single sign-on to all your cloud services. This may also facilitate the use of personal devices to access enterprise applications, provided that you can prohibit downloading of data and/or protect downloaded data with a MDM. If you are also deploying cloud services to your clients, such as portals, data rooms, collaboration sites, etc then a cloud authentication platform will allow them to manage their own users logins and passwords, or even setup single sign-on to your cloud services if they prefer. This will provide an agile work practice for your clients too!
From an application management perspective, if you are using cloud services then the heavy lifting is being done by the SaaS provider. This means that application support managers and teams can focus on areas that provide more value to the business such as testing new features as they are released, ongoing training to get the most out of the features and also integration with other solutions.
One key challenge when firms move to an agile and flexible work space is measuring what people are doing when working remotely. The key performance indicators need to focus on outcomes and deliverables rather than the number of hours worked. And there are many tools that can be used to stay connected with your mobile and remote workers such as instant messaging, presence and desktop video.