Build & Execute an Enterprise Device Management Strategy
Build a digital workplace for the workforce of the future.
As hybrid and fully remote work cements itself as a mainstay of modern society, end user computing devices are increasingly core enablers of productivity and value. Managing these devices effectively across the enterprise demands a digital workplace strategy based on understanding the users and the use cases behind the devices – and ensuring IT has a support plan to manage those devices safely and efficiently. Use this blueprint to take a holistic approach to enterprise device management, enabling user productivity while ensuring organizational security.
Technology enables many functions that were exponentially more difficult in the past, but it has little value without a person driving it. A modern device management strategy must consider what devices are being used online, as well as how, when, and why they’re being leveraged. Understanding the people and use cases behind all organizational devices will help ensure IT has a robust support plan to manage them safely and efficiently.
1. Focus on the needs of your organization over new technical capabilities.
Devices and device management are a means to the end of staff being productive and your organization to deliver value. Categorize user roles based on how they work to establish different enterprise personas with similar technical needs. Understand the pain points and desired gains for each persona to design a strategy aligned with your organization’s goals.
2. Policy makes perfect.
Security and privacy must be a core pillar of strong device management. With an increasing number of new devices available, more of these devices connecting to the internet, and different provisioning models available to different employees, clear policies on device entitlements and acceptable use are essential to minimize risk.
3. Support the whole lifecycle, not just adoption.
Providing users with devices that better meet their needs will improve their IT satisfaction, but this will plateau quickly without adequate technical support. Identify the most common incident and request tickets to identify opportunities to improve self-service and first contact resolution. Prioritize quick wins and high-value/high-effort improvements.
Use our step-by-step blueprint to transform your device management strategy, balancing user choice with risk and cost
Build a future-ready enterprise device management strategy and roadmap to set up your digital workspace and workforce for the future with our comprehensive methodology, templates, and tools. Use this robust framework to:
- Identify and research target enterprise device management capabilities, key organizational personas, and end user challenges.
- Document and define standard offerings and communicate options and requirements through clear policies.
- Develop a comprehensive roadmap, including initiatives and metrics, to successfully implement your strategy.
Member Testimonials
After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve. See our top member experiences for this blueprint and what our clients have to say.
9.2/10
Overall Impact
$38,290
Average $ Saved
23
Average Days Saved
Client
Experience
Impact
$ Saved
Days Saved
City Of Fort Collins
Workshop
9/10
$34,250
20
Jeremy did an amazing job at driving the conversations forward and adapting the workshop to best meet the city's needs. He truly understood our or... Read More
Canadian Defence Academy
Guided Implementation
10/10
$25,000
20
Scott was very knowledgeable. His experience with both on premise application hosting and cloud services saved us valuable time scoping and planni... Read More
Asahi Intecc USA
Guided Implementation
10/10
$13,700
20
Bruce Power L P
Workshop
8/10
$50,000
10
Jeremy was the best part of the experience - his ability to maintain engagement, understand our particular business landscape, and add value / insi... Read More
Modesto Irrigation District
Guided Implementation
10/10
N/A
50
Denver Water
Guided Implementation
8/10
$68,500
20
Build & Execute an Enterprise Device Management Strategy
Build a digital workplace for the workforce of the future.
Analyst perspective
Strike the right balance between cost, risk, and user choice.
Wherever they may be working, end users need devices that are fit for purpose, that enable productivity, and that ensure company resources remain protected. You need to understand how to manage end user devices so employees are enabled with the right tools while also protecting the organization’s data. Your decisions around these items are the foundation of your users’ digital workplace.
An enterprise device management strategy should speak to an understanding of how employees use enterprise devices. This strategy goes beyond deciding what devices to provide to the employees: it should ensure device policies align with existing security and infrastructure policies and standards and help you to develop compliance and configurations to support those policies. The enterprise device management strategy will help you deliver this experience and help you determine which tools you will use to govern devices and control access to sensitive data.
However, it’s not enough to simply implement a device management solution that allows you to get devices in users’ hands and then wipe them if needed. Instead, decisions about tools ought to spring from a holistic strategy that thinks about how users are using their devices. Who are your users? What are the key enterprise personas and use cases that the strategy needs to support? Use this blueprint to understand the people and use cases behind the devices and ensure IT has a support plan to manage those devices safely and efficiently.
Emily Sugerman
Senior Research Analyst, Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group
Executive Summary
Your ChallengeIT needs to answer these questions:
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Common ObstaclesDevice management becomes more complex as:
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Info-Tech’s ApproachThis blueprint will help you create a digital workplace strategy that identifies:
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Start by understanding end users and use cases
Proactive enterprise device management is not merely about managing devices – it’s about building a digital workplace strategy based on understanding the people and use cases behind the devices and ensuring IT has a support plan to manage those devices safely and efficiently.
Your challenge
This blueprint will help you build a strategy that answers these questions:
- How do end-user devices support larger corporate priorities and strategies?
- What types of computing devices should be offered to end users?
- What provisioning models will be used?
- What are the policies and governance surrounding how devices are used? Which compliance & regulatory obligations drive your enterprise device management principles?
- How will IT support devices?
- How will IT measure the success of its enterprise device management strategy?
Definition: Device Management
“Device management enables organizations to administer and maintain devices, including virtual machines, physical computers, mobile devices, and IoT devices. Device management is a critical component of any organization's security strategy. It helps ensure that devices are secure, up-to-date, and compliant with organizational policies, with the goal of protecting the corporate network and data from unauthorized access.” (Microsoft)
Common obstacles
These barriers make this challenge difficult to address for many organizations:
- The number and type of devices IT is expected to support has increased.
- Remote and hybrid work still comprises a significant portion of the workforce. In 2024, 27% US employees reported working in hybrid conditions and 11% reported being fully remote (Owl Labs, State of Hybrid Work 2024).
- Enterprise mobility management and unified endpoint management tools are better poised to support a remote/hybrid workforce, cross-platform reality. However, a proliferation of unified endpoint management (UEM) tools raises the risk of tool sprawl, while endpoint vulnerabilities remain.
Top three reasons device management is becoming more challenging:
59%
“We deployed more IoT and/or mobile devices.”
Source: Knuth & Gruber, “Managing the Endpoint Vulnerability Gap,” 2023
49%
“We support more remote workers today.”
Source: Knuth & Gruber, “Managing the Endpoint Vulnerability Gap,” 2023
40%
“The number of endpoint vulnerabilities has increased” and “Employees use an assortment of devices as part of their job.”
Source: Knuth & Gruber
Good devices are necessary for overall IT satisfaction
A bad device can ruin a person’s satisfaction with IT
Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision has shown that when someone is dissatisfied with their device, their satisfaction with IT overall is only 62.68% on average.
When a person is satisfied with their device, their average satisfaction increases by approximately 20 percentage points to 82.35%.
However, end user satisfaction with standard device offerings will not itself guarantee the success of the device management strategy.
Source: Info-Tech Research Group, CIO Business Vision, 2024; N=15,491
BUT
Good devices are not enough for high satisfaction
Devices have the smallest impact on improving overall IT satisfaction
Improvements in business apps, networks, and communication infrastructure, service desk, and IT policy all have a higher impact on increasing satisfaction.
For every one-point increase in satisfaction in those areas, respondents’ overall satisfaction with IT increased by the respective percentage of a point.
Source: Info-Tech Research Group, CIO Business Vision, 2024; N=15,491
Info-Tech’s methodology for enterprise device management strategy
1. Set the Direction |
2. Define the Offering |
3. Build the Roadmap |
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Phase Steps |
1.1 Define current state, drivers, and goals 1.2 Build enterprise personas |
2.1 Define the standard offerings 2.2 Outline supporting services 2.3 Define policies |
3.1 Define metrics 3.2 Develop roadmap initiatives |
Phase Outcomes |
Current-state assessment Device management target state capabilities Personas |
Standard offerings by persona Device management model Technical support model Device entitlement policy Acceptable use policy Remote wipe policy & waiver Personal device reimbursement policy |
List of metrics Strategy and roadmap |
Insight summary
Start by understanding end users and user cases
Proactive enterprise device management is not merely about managing devices, it’s about building a strategy based on understanding the people and use cases behind the devices and ensuring IT has a support plan to manage those devices safely and efficiently.
Bring it back to stakeholder priorities
Before you define your target device management capabilities, ensure your target state resonates with the business by identifying senior leadership’s priorities and aligning your own goals to them.
Balance choice, risk, and cost
The balance of user choice, risk mitigation, and cost optimization is unique for each organization.
Standardize the nonstandard
When users such as VIP users want more than the standard offering, have a more prestigious option available. This approach will help you to proactively anticipate your users’ needs.
Don’t forget about end user experience
If end users are dissatisfied with devices, they will also be dissatisfied with IT. But if you don’t also focus on support, giving users better devices will only marginally increase satisfaction with IT.
Blueprint deliverables
Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals.
Persona Analysis Workbook
Use these worksheets to guide your analysis.
Standard End-User Entitlements and Offerings
Define your supported offerings and publish this document in your service catalog.
Policy Templates
Use these templates as a starting point for addressing policy gaps
Roadmap Tool
Record your list of initiatives related to the strategy.
Key deliverable:
Enterprise Device Management Strategy
Document your strategy using this boardroom-ready template.
Blueprint benefits
IT Benefits
- Deliver immediate value to end users.
- Provide the best service based on the user persona.
- Provide better device coverage.
- Use fewer tools to manage a less diverse but equally effective array of end-user computing devices.
- Provide more managed devices that will help to limit risk.
- Have better visibility into the end-user computing devices and apps.
Business Benefits
- Conduct corporate business under one broad strategy.
- Provide support to IT for specific applications and devices.
- Take advantage of more scalable economies for providing more advantageous technologies.
- Experience less friction between end users and the business and higher end-user satisfaction.
Measure the value of this blueprint
Your end-user computing strategy is an investment
Track the returns on your investment, even if those returns are soft benefits and not cost reductions.
User Satisfaction
- Satisfaction with device
- Satisfaction with business apps
- Satisfaction with service desk timeliness
- Satisfaction with service desk effectiveness
- Satisfaction with IT
- Employee engagement
Total Cost
- Spend on each type of device
- Cost of licenses for management tools, operating systems, and apps
- Cost of support agreements
- Number of support tickets per device per employee
- Time spent supporting devices per tier or support team
- Time spent per OS/app release
Risk Mitigation
- Number of devices that are end-of-life
- Percent of devices in compliance
- Number of unmanaged devices
- Number of devices that have not checked in to the management tool
Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs
DIY Toolkit
"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."
Guided Implementation
"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assstance to determine where to focus. Some checkins-along the way would help keep us on track."
Workshop
"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."
Executive & Technical Counseling
Our team and processes are maturing; however, to expedite the journey we'll need a seasoned practitioner to coach and validate approaches, deliverables, and opportunities.
Counsulting
Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks are used throughout all five options.
Guided Implementation
What does a typical GI on this topic look like?
Phase 1: Set the Direction |
Phase 2: Define the Offering |
Phase 3: Build the Roadmap |
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Call #6: Define metrics and build a roadmap. |
A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.
A typical GI is 8 to 10 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.
Workshop overview
Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | |
Activities | Set the Direction1.1 Define current state, drivers, and goals 1.2 Begin building enterprise personas | Establish Personas2.1 Continue defining enterprise personas 2.1 Define the standard offerings | Define the Offering3.1 Outline supporting services 3.2 Define policies | Build the Roadmap4.1 Define metrics 4.2 Develop initiatives |
Deliverables |
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Phase 1
Set the direction
Phase 1
1.1 Define current state, drivers & goals
1.2 Build enterprise personas
Build & Execute an Enterprise Device Management Strategy
Step 1.1
Define current state, drivers & goals
Activities
1.1.1 Define drivers and goals and align organizational goals to target device management capabilities
1.1.2 Assess the current state of end-user device management
Set the Direction
This step requires the following inputs:
- Current approach for device management
- List of strengths and weaknesses of the current approach
This step involves the following participants:
- CIO
- End-User Computing Team
- IT Leadership
- End-User Computing Manager
Outcomes of this step
- Current-state assessment
- List of device management target-state capabilities
1.1.1 Align organizational goals to target device management capabilities
1-2 hours
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Using the guidance on slides 19-21, brainstorm the business goals of the organization.
- Review relevant corporate and IT strategies or
- Review these business goal definitions including key goal indicator metrics.
- Identify one to two enterprise device management capabilities that will support each goal. These should be objectives for the enterprise device management strategy that will support the identified business goals.
- Document organizational goals and target enterprise device management capabilities in the Enterprise Device Management Strategy Template.
Download the Strategy Template
Input
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Output
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Materials
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Participants
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Analyze organizational goals
Identifying the organization’s direction is the first step in aligning your target capabilities with the business vision
An enterprise device management strategy should enable business activities by balancing user choice, cost, and risk. The right balance will be unique for every organization.
Key tactics to identifying organizational goals:
- Review an existing business strategy. If you can’t identify corporate goals, use business goals instead.
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In the absence of a well-defined corporate strategy, ask questions to identify relevant objectives:
- What is the message being delivered by leadership?
- What are the main themes of investments and projects?
- What are the senior leaders measured on?
Example:
A higher education institution is planning to expand operations and needs to accommodate projected enrollment growth. Furthermore, the institution plans to mitigate organizational risk by enabling permanent virtual instruction capabilities.
Organizational goals:
- Portfolio of competitive products and services
- Managed business risk
- Managed digital transformation programs
To support these goals, the enterprise device management strategy will need to build out new device management capabilities: enable VDI, create more options for provisioning computers to new workers, and improve patching and security compliance checking of remote devices.
Standard organizational goals 1/2
The goals below are from COBIT 2019 and have been designed to apply to most types of organization
Goal Name |
Key Goal Indicator examples |
Portfolio of competitive products & services |
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Managed business risk |
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Compliance with external laws & regulations |
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Quality of financial information |
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Customer-oriented service culture |
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Business service continuity and availability |
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About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
- Build & Execute an Enterprise Device Management Strategy Storyboard
- Enterprise Device Management Strategy Template
- Persona Analysis Workbook
- Standard End-User Entitlements and Offerings Template
- End-User Policy Templates
- Roadmap Tool
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 6 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Set the Direction
- Call 1: Discuss your current state.
- Call 2: Perform a user group analysis and create enterprise device personas.
Guided Implementation 2: Define the Offering
- Call 1: Define standard offerings.
- Call 2: Select provisioning models. Identify gaps in governance and policies.
- Call 3: Outline supporting services and opportunities to shift end-user computing support left.
Guided Implementation 3: Build the Roadmap
- Call 1: Define metrics and build a roadmap.
Contributors
- Steve Fox, Deputy IT Director, Virginia State Corporation Commission
- Mazen Joukhadar, TransForm Shared Service Organization
- Nathan Schlaud, PMO Senior Director, RPC Inc.
- Rebecca Mountjoy, Infrastructure Systems Manager, BlueScope Buildings
- DJ Robins, Director of Information Technology, Mohawk MedBuy
- Jason Jenkins, Tech Specialist, Michal Baker Corp.
- Brad Wells, IT Infrastructure Solutions Architect, London Police Service
- Danelle Peddell, Director, Project Management Office, Emco Corporation
- [6 anonymous contributors]
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