Mission operators must command, diagnose, and correct in-flight spacecraft in a timely and cost-effective manner. These functions may involve near-real-time coordination with flight hardware/software engineers, test teams, instrument subcontractors, scientists, and other subject matter experts not typically present in the Mission Operations Center (MOC). During regular and emergency operations, missions benefit from the ability to connect geographically disparate resources with near-real-time (NRT) mission data. Highly mobile, computationally capable tablets, such as iOS and Android devices, enable this novel data mobility in an affordable and scalable way. However, this flexibility is not achieved by simply treating these devices as standard Internet devices. Rather, they require an evaluation of data and control flows through the MOC architecture. Security models must implement access controls to protect data access from outside of MOC subnets and limit exposure of flight networks to public networks. The touchscreens that comprise the main user input of tablet devices require a human-computer-interface analysis to visualize verbose, multi-dimensional telemetry. Finally, local computation and data storage must be optimized to provide reasonable battery life for these energy-constrained devices. This paper outlines the benefits of mobile devices in MOCs, including a series of operational use cases uniquely enabled by this technology. We present a set of metrics, such as Mean Time To Data Expert (MTDE), used to measure the benefits to adopting missions. A multi-tiered data distribution architecture, as prototyped at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, is presented along with lessons learned from the implementation. We conclude that mobile devices will continue to grow in capability, lessen in cost, and will inevitably migrate into the mission operational picture. However, without the systems analysis and design activities outlined in this paper, initial implementations will risk security, usability, and stability issues for early adopters.