Enterprise Mobility: The Journey and Some Insights

Excitement in my leadership team when we discussed around leveraging mobility as a key platform for connecting our countrywide stakeholders to enable one of our key on-going marketing promotion was good enough reason for us to start thinking in that direction. Today, this mobile application clocks around 15,000 validations daily right across the country and the usage is growing day-by-day. The interesting point here is that the enterprise mobility adoption is more an offshoot of the consumer mobility and hence the acceptability and comfort levels it has among the masses makes it a welcome option.

The ecosystem changes augmenting the smarter capabilities, performance, and user friendliness as lower cost fuels the smartphone revolution which is yet another backbone driving mobility. The advent of ‘wearables' including smart watches is also giving new dimensions to mobility.

In early 2010 we saw very few developers and solutions. Today, the situation is different with many players and proven solutions. Even in-house capabilities has bettered and today ‘enterprise app stores' give the internal customers applications even in a day's time. From the partner world, going forward more and more players are bound to come in and make the app market richer.

Another compelling reason behind this drive is the agility what today's business needs. In today's time even a 10 second delay in any service or response is considered as a negative customer engagement factor. The corporate IT leadership need to take a serious note of this and come out of the traditional solutions which needs months and years to complete. Mobility as a platform enables us to think ‘light' with rapid deployment options with probably shorter lifecycles. While today there are certain usage areas ruling the majority of the mobility apps, focus needs to be put on out-of-the-box thinking to identify candidates for mobility adoption. While working on the identification as well as design after identification the right amount of focus needs to be put on the need to facilitate innovative ways of tackling business situations and needs with rich yet light and smooth experience. Some apps even position differently through mashing of own data with other data available publicly or privately through API providing uniquely different innovative usage models.

Organizations are increasingly realizing the internal pull for mobility precipitated by the workforce comprising of ‘T-shaped managers' and millennials. The ‘C' suite is getting expanded by the inclusion of Chief Digital Officers which is further driving creation of digital assets. In next couple of years, even talent attraction and retention will as well get linked to the availability of working conditions enabled through mobility. As we see more infusion of the next generation into the workforce and more into the C-levels, further speed and momentum is sure to get generated.

Eventually one of the interesting questions is whether all these will lead to the demise of the ‘enterprise applications' or not. If the performance trends of the so called ‘enterprise class' solution providers are to be assessed against the ‘new age' players it is clearly marking the beginning of a new era. While this is being realized by the ‘enterprise solution' providers, their rigid and deep working models are making their transition difficult and slow.

WHAT DRIVES MOBILITY

One of the vehicles of the mobility is the carriers and their infrastructure. In India we have stories which lets us experience the rich 4G going way down to 2G and beyond even up to ‘no G'. The GPS and other positioning tools which are heavily used in mobile apps also is getting mature with more high precision options but relies heavily on good connectivity. When we launched our mobile app for the sales force, there was a big concern on the carrier coverage in the rural areas and therefore the effectiveness. But today apps are getting designed to survive in this tough terrain with various design strategies and hence the concern got settled quite quickly.

However, for a seamless experience, our country still has miles to go in this space and I hope the providers will realize the potential opportunity and make ‘win-win' propositions. As more and more Wi-Fi governance capabilities get built and the access and governance become mature, the apps will have a good run inside the office as well. The smart wars fought by the mobility OS platforms is yet another challenge for rapid adoption and organizations need to plan out the architecture and user interfaces keeping in mind the usability and experience needed across platforms.