The average smartphone user checks their device 125 to 150 times per day, so not surprisingly, as our devices become more powerful and the apps we use become more versatile, connecting our data repositories wherever they may sit, we’re moving more and more of our personal and professional lives into these devices. The problem is that there is a definite gap between the consumer-focused apps we use and love, and those that our corporate IT teams can deliver to help keep us productive and connected.
We all want our company platforms and solutions to work as seamlessly as the apps and tools we use on our smartphones, but the current reality is that few companies want to venture into the complexity and customized world of the enterprise when they can achieve huge numbers of followers and downloads by focusing on the consumer segment.
Having said that, the movement toward the enterprise is still happening — because the enterprise is moving closer to the consumer experience. We’ve all heard about “the consumerization of IT” and the bring-your-own-device movement, but these are just the natural result of a society that is becoming more and more mobile.
Two decades back, many large organizations began experimenting with new employment models, with some companies even offering various packages and perks to telecommuters, such as paying for internet connections (not a small cost back then), printers and monitors, and other services as a way of reducing costs and improving employee work-life balance. The rapid replacement of desktop PCs with laptops furthered this trend, making the information worker much more mobile. Huge companies like Pacific Bell remodeled sections of their buildings for the “transient worker,” setting up “hoteling” spaces where people could drop in for face-to-face meetings, connect to the intranet and shared printers, and use the phones while in the building, and then return to their home offices.
As the speed of our hardware and software increased, and the price of connectivity decreased, this mobility trend continued to chip away at the traditional office hours model. However, with more people working from home, and sometimes unable to walk over to the IT team to ask for help or suggestion on the right tool to use, there opened up an opportunity for enterprising developers to provide these tools and capabilities to help individuals become more productive.
Increasingly, the focus of both consumer and enterprise development is shifting toward mobility. But don’t think of “mobile” as a telephony category — there’s more to mobility than smartphones and tablets. Think of it as functional portability; the ability to take your work (or your fun) wherever you need to go. For example, I was visiting my daughter at school in Utah, and used her laptop to update my music playlists on Spotify for the trip home to Seattle. We drove for 14 hours, and only lost our connection twice (temporarily): once in southern Idaho, and the other while crossing over a mountain pass in Oregon. While this example is of a consumer-based technology, the concept remains the same: accessing one platform on three different devices, including one belonging to someone else, but with a consistent experience that followed me literally as I crossed the country.
We expect the solutions we use at home to be available at work, when we’re on the road, or even when logging into a shared computer at an internet café while vacationing in Costa Rica. It’s not about “consumerization of IT” or BYOD, but about extending the user experience across whatever tool we use.
In a recent presentation, Bill Seibel, president of the world’s largest mobility services company, Mobiquity, shared that the maturity of mobility was around transcribing our old website models into mobile form. He said that the pattern for organizations is to first experiment, testing out various models of engagement, and focusing heavily on branding. But as they learned about their users — and, more importantly, where the user experience could be extended, their solutions moved into more complex and richer user experiences:
- Commerce, loyalty and analytics
- Behavior change
- Reach
- Distributed workforce
- Customer journey
While there are many efforts underway to build out net-new functionality — apps that provide new capability that were never before possible, or at least not accessible to mainstream users (think location-based applications, pioneered by companies like FourSquare), the bulk of innovation around mobility comes from extending those applications and systems already available behind the firewall, inside the enterprise. Extending these enterprise systems into mobile platforms will be one of the key sources of corporate innovation over the coming decade, with mobile-enabled business processes that improve business productivity.
The takeaway here is not to approach mobile by saying “What can I do with mobile?” Instead, think about the business areas that are causing you the most problems, and where your employees are inefficient. Think about your customer experience when interacting with your products, your people, or your brand. Also think about how you can better motivate your employees, your partners, and your customers through mobile solutions. If you focus on improving these areas, with mobility being one possible platform or option for those improvements, it may change how you approach the problem entirely. In the end, mobility becomes more of a strategy than another platform to deploy.
Christian Buckley is Chief Evangelist at Metalogix.
