Tag: Enterprise mobility
Less than one in every four small business has a mobile app, now, but this figure is set to rise to 50% of all small businesses, by 2017. The simple explanation for the app boom is customers wanting to engage through mobile devices. While less than 10% of all internet traffic came from mobile devices three years ago, this figure is close to 70% at the end of 2016.
Customer preferences apart, there are several reasons why it makes sense to roll out business apps.
Improved Visibility and Enhanced Sales
As the adage goes, “Out of sight, out of mind.” This is truer than ever before today, as customers, faced with information glut from hyper-competitive marketers of all hues, have short attention spans. Inducing a customer to download an app is the sure-fire way of ensuring the business remains visible.
An average American spends more than two hours a day fiddling with smartphones. If nothing else, being “in the way” when such users unlock, scrolls, and search for the apps they want creates an unconscious bond with the brand.
The presence of an app on the customer’s smartphone also makes it that much easier for marketers to send in push notifications to the mobile. A mobile app is the digital equivalent of a blank billboard sign, with the customer a virtual captive audience. The marketer can make the app hip, stylish, functional, informative, or anything else, depending on what appeals to target customers more, and what drives engagement most.
The rule of “effective frequency” in advertising holds that hearing or seeing a brand about 20 times is what it takes to get truly noticed. The more often customers involved with the app, or simply recall the brand, the more they would be inclined to buy at the earliest opportunity.
Such improved visibility works. A case in point is 35.4% of last year’s Black Friday sales being completed on mobile devices, almost double the proportion of previous years.
Better Communication
Mobile apps facilitate a direct communication channel between stakeholders, be it between customers and marketers, between team members, between managers and staff, between channel partners and senior management, or anyone else. All relevant information passes directly to the app user’s customer’s fingertips, without having to wonder whether the message went through to the intended recipient.
With more and more customers now preferring self-service, mobile apps offers an effective medium to initiate the transaction. For instance, a customer may use the mobile app to reserve the table, or even place the order, before coming in. An employee may use the in-house HR app to apply for leave, or report being late to work due to an emergency, with the app doing all the follow up processing automatically.
A survey by Clutch survey found the following elements as most valuable to include in small business apps:
- Customer loyalty features, such as rewards and loyalty points
- Social networking updates
- Push notifications on latest news and offers
- Personalized interactions
Streamlined Internal Processes
A good mobile app improves sales and improves communications. However, the benefit of enterprise apps goes far beyond boosting engagement and increasing sales. Businesses are slowly but surely realizing the power of mobile apps in transforming internal processes.
Mobile apps streamline businesses processes, reducing paperwork, giving specific direction and framework to convoluted or vague processes, and accelerating the execution of tasks. For instance, a field service app offers a wealth of real time practical information to field service executives and quality inspectors, enabling them to schedule field visits dynamically and interactively, connect with the main office to get help on troubleshooting field equipment, get inspection forms auto-generated for the location, and also auto-populated. Likewise, employees could use an expense claim app to capture bills and submit it automatically, eliminating manual paperwork and avoiding time on non-productive activity.
Mobile apps have the potential to transform operations and logistics as well. Intuitive apps to scan bar codes and track inventory make the system accurate and quicken up the process. Connecting the app to a cloud-based CMS improves transparency greatly, making explicit the status of a product or package to all stakeholders. Improved prediction, better planning, and improved customer satisfaction are just some of the benefits resulting from such transparency.
Effective Workforce
Internal apps make life easy for workforce, cutting across hierarchies and functions. Managers could use apps to track their employees in real time, allocate work, see work queues, and track the status of pending work, or the work done by the team. The rank and file may use apps to collaborate with other team members effectively, refer technical manuals and instruction books, follow the recommended workflow and work queue, upload documents, and do more. Regardless of the nature of work, there is faster turnaround times with an enterprise app.
With mobility in an unprecedented boom phase, there is no better time than today to roll out apps for your business. However, the stakes are high, and it is important to get the process right. Your best bet in business app development is to partner with a professional app development company like us. We have vast experience and a highly talented pool of developers. Enterprises come to us, convinced by our ability to understand your requirements and roll out the latest and innovate mobile apps.
Mobility is the midst of an unprecedented boom phase, as more and more enterprises seek to leverage the advantages it offers in terms of remaining connected anytime and anywhere, unmatched convenience, improved efficiency, and more. Most enterprises now regard investments in mobility as a key cutting-edge initiative, and this holds true for both B2C and B2B enterprises.
However, amidst the mobility boom, many enterprises falter on the implementation front. About two out of every three IT leaders list mobility as their top priority in 2016, and there is no dearth of mobile apps in enterprises. However, only 48% of enterprises have a formal mobile strategy in place. Enterprises lose out on the full benefits of mobility without a coherent strategy. Many organizations are still in early stages of their mobile strategy development, and remain overwhelmed with technology standards, data governance, and security challenges, leave alone application development and user experience.
The Elements of a Mobility Strategy
Mobility driven solutions speeds up processes, makes systems more efficient and transparent, and enhances employee engagement. Above all, mobility has the potential to power long-term growth, and transform businesses. However, it requires a coherent mobile strategy to effect a successful digital transformation.
The first wave of mobility boosted efficiency in a big way. Mobility is now on the cusp of a new wave, where enterprises are increasingly leveraging mobile devices to innovate, to unlock business value, and power disruptive change.
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Mobility 1.0: Migrating Existing Digital Assets to Mobile
The first wave of the mobility revolution involves migrating or extending existing functions and apps to mobility. This includes mobile-optimizing websites, and launching micro apps for specific purposes, such as approvals, expense reporting, and time tracking.
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Mobility 2.0: Transform Existing Processes
The second wave of mobility revolution involves enhancing capabilities of existing apps, by infusing it with new functionality that fully leverages the possibilities offered by mobility. An app could, for instance, offer functionality based on smartphone features such as bar-code scanning, image scanning, and location data. Retailers could improve in-store customer service by offering real-time information and discounts to customers, based on GPS or location data. Temperature and vibration data, derived from sensors, could minimize downtime in processing plants.
Mobile enabled processes are on the whole simpler, faster, convenient, and accurate. For instance, a mobile expense submitting process, which auto-populate forms and allow capturing receipts digitally using the smartphone camera, is much quicker and easier than the cumbersome paperwork and productivity killing tasks otherwise required for the process.
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Mobility 3.0: New Business Models
The biggest benefits of mobility realize by combining technology with process transformation.
New design paradigms based on touch and voice navigation, combined with the portability mobility infuses dynamism into business processes, and unlocks many possibilities not viable before.
Integrating mobility and analytics enable a shift from standardized to personalized, which improves engagement and customer satisfaction, and also allows enterprises to conserve resources, without using it for prospects and customers who do not need it, or are unlikely to be impressed by it. Companies could also offer new contextual services, integrating location, device type, transaction history, social media sentiment, and other relevant information.
The success of any business in today’s highly competitive world requires a proactive approach, rather than dealing with events reactively. Proactiveness requires being driven by insights, and the ability to remain connected with the stakeholders and the ecosystem, in real time. Mobile devices facilitate the collaboration and cooperation required to apply proactive measures.
Examples of how mobility can transform business models are aplenty:
- Tech player Square allows consumers and businesses to accept credit card payments, by integrating a tiny device on the headphone jack of a mobile device, eliminating the need for a swiping machine or a financial intermediary
- Commuters in Spain and Germany pay for their travel tickets through contactless smart cards and payment systems, powered by NFC-enabled smartphones. Widespread adoption of the concept can eliminate cash tills and ticket counters in a big way.
- Mobility inspired augmented reality solutions revolutionize the way their field forces access parts and repair documentation. What took several individuals with specialized training days to complete now requires just a few hours, and just a single ordinary repair technician with general training, and who knows how to use a smartphone app. A three-dimensional augmented reality (AR) app guides the technician step-by-step through the repair, identifying all the parts and seeing exactly what actions to take via animated video clips.
The Wider Ecosystem
A successful mobile strategy cannot be executed in isolation. It is rather part of a wider digital strategy that includes social, analytics, and cloud, among other things. The social-mobility-analytics-cloud (SMAC) stack enables organizations to embark on a digital revolution, offering ubiquitous connectivity and new ways of interacting with their ecosystem. The cloud especially complements the mobile strategy perfectly. Apart from cloud-resident SaaS (Software as a Service) applications that deliver mobile applications, the cloud offers storage solutions, testing environments for cloud-based enterprise app development, mobile application middle-ware and development tools, and also Analytics as a Service (AaaS) capabilities.
Using mobility as part of a toolkit, to reinvent internal processes and transform business models works wonders as long as the harbingers of change know what they are doing. The best approach is to partner with an experienced and established solutions provider. We bring to the table not just skills and talent, but also the ability to gain from our experience of having executed several successful mobility projects, cutting across sectors. We not only lend our expertise on designing highly efficient systems, but also help you guide decisions around the essential architecture, standards, security, and governance decisions.
The proliferation of smartphones of various hues has made the mobile ecosystem hopelessly fragmented. Cross platform mobile application development is the in-thing now, as developing a native app for each platform is both time-consuming and resource crunching. At the bare minimum, a new app has to be compatible with and available on Google Play, iTunes and Windows, the three major mobile platforms, and this basically entails reinventing the wheel three times over.
Building a cross platform mobile app, however, is not easy, owing to the differences in the programming language, event model, UI model, and resource models. HTML5 emerged as the bright new hope at the turn of the decade, but flattered to deceive, often creating data integrity, security, and syncing issues.
The following are ten popular cross-platform mobile application development tools that gained centre stage in 2016, not ranked in any particular order.
1. Xamarin
Microsoft’s Xamarin is the most powerful and robust among the several cross-platform application development tools in vogue. It enables developers to build applications for different operating systems, using a single programming language, code base, and class library.
With its C# codebase, Xamarin allows developers to roll out Android, iOS and Windows apps without duplicating the effort. Xamarin comes equipped with a rich set of features, such as Lambda Expressions, Dynamic programming, LINQ, and a wide range of new .NET APIs. It has added F# of late, as well. These features allow developers to share a lot of the app logic between platforms, drastically reducing time to market compared to building native UIs for each platform.
Xamarin supports both Model-View-Controller (MVC) and Model View ViewModel (MVVM) patterns. The MVC pattern allows developers to keep application logic and presentation separate, and modify, test, update, and maintain application code easily. The MVVM pattern allows programmers to reuse the code base to create other projects. Users need to chalk out platform specific code only for the UI, with the option to reuse all other code. The clients get a fluid performance of native apps without maintaining multiple code bases. Xamarin also offers a cloud service, facilitating the testing of any number of devices.
Custom plug-ins that may be compiled easily further promote reuse. Xamarin Forms allow developers to achieve 96% reusability on their projects.
2. Kinvey
Kinvey works on a cloud backed model, with HTML5 as the base. The suite Integration with Gizmox’s Visual WebGui HTML5 platform allow developers to roll out the apps developed under HTML5 using C# or VB.NET, and Visual Studio, thereby offering a solution to the security and other technical challenges that deploying cross-platform HTML5 poses. The app facilitates simple, fast-paced agile app development.
3. Xojo
Xojo positions itself on offering a simple way to create cross-platform apps, not just for mobile platforms such as Android and iOS, but also desktop apps for Windows, Linux, and OS X, and for Raspberry Pi as well.
The Xojo development tool allows developers to create a single code base and compiles the developed apps as native executables for the required platform. The powerful code editor and an intuitive drag and drop option make the task of developing apps very easy. The Xojo backend does all the work, and infuse the new apps with controls familiar to the platform, giving it the look and feel of an app developed on the native platform.
4. Appcelerator
The Appcelerator app development platform facilitates coding in JavaScript, and offer several value-added features such as real-time mobile analytics, and Mobile backend as a service (MbaaS.) It offers a host of high-quality drag-and-drop palette, and achieves 60% to 90% of code reuse when publishing on different platforms.
5. Mag+
The Mag+ app SDK is highly preferred in the print industry, for catalogs, magazines, and other marketing collateral. The app offers core components for each platform, and allow developers to build atop these components. It is even possible to roll out simple cross-platform apps in double quick time, without any coding.
6. Corona Labs
Corona is popular in the gaming industry, to develop cross-platform 2D graphics games app and educational apps. Corona adopts the powerful and flexible Lua programming language, which is written in C. Corona SDK generates instant results, as soon as the developers write the code. The SDK allows setting up prototypes in double quick time, with minimal code, accelerating time to market.
7. Cocos2D
Cocos2D is a set of frameworks that allow publishing to different mobile platforms, and even desktops from a single code base. Additionally, it offers the flexibility to code in C++, JavaScript, C#, objective C, and a few other languages.
Cocos2D is open source and mostly used to develop cross-platform games and animated content.
8. MobinCube
MobinCube offers a series of templates with drag-and-drop functionality, allowing users to roll out apps on the fly. The simple and easy non-code methodology allow even ordinary, non-technical users to develop apps that work across platforms.
9. Dropsource
Dropsource is a browser based app builder, offering automated solutions for creating Android and iOS apps. The editor offers easy drag and drop interface, connect apps with any RESTful API, and an integrated development environment to customise the source code.
10. BiznessApps
BiznessApps thrives on offering simple solutions to small businesses who want to get basic apps running without hassles. It facilitates developing cross platform apps and mobile websites, through drag-and-drop development and automated submission to the app store, without the need for coding. There are a host of value added features such as seamless integration with third-party systems, rich analytical insights, and more, on offer.
The many cross-platform application development tools on offer are all easily within reach, and the possibilities endless. However, you still have to develop the apps, and make sure to get the UX, the overriding concept and other crucial ingredients right. When you partner with us for your cross-platform mobile application development, you gain from our vast expertise and our highly skilled talent pool, who are seasoned in developing hundreds of cross-platform apps, for all purposes, and for all sectors.
The mobile ecosystem is hopelessly fragmented, with a multitude of devices, powered by divergent flavors of multiple operating systems. Developing native platform specific apps in such a state of affairs is akin to battling against desert sand. Cross-platform development would seem as the obvious choice in such a state of affairs. Many developers simply embrace cross-platform development instead. Gartner estimates about 50% of apps are now hybrid.
The obvious benefit of cross-platform mobile application development is reduced costs. Developers spend their time and resources only once, rather than reinvent the wheel for each platform. The savings that emerge when only one instance of the software has to be maintained, on a periodic basis, offers even greater savings. Updates sync automatically to all platforms. Code re-usability and enhanced cloud-based deployments contribute to reduced costs in a big way as well. Such benefits are invaluable in a highly competitive environment where businesses are looking to cut costs and improve process efficiency in a big way.
Cross-platform development infuses consistency to the app, cutting across platforms and devices. A uniform look and feel go a long way in reinforcing the brand image and improving retention rates.
A unified code base enables rapid deployment or faster time to market. This is critical in today’s fast-paced business environment, where apps generally have a short shelf life, and changes in technology make apps obsolete by the day. It especially alleviates the issue of developers cutting corners with testing, for want of time.
HTML5 held promise as the harbinger of a cross-platform world. However, it has lost its luster in the last couple of years as it strived to forge a middle ground and ended up being neither here nor there. One of the biggest stumbling blocks of HTML5 was its inability to trump the distinct UIs of Android and Apple phones. Newer tools such as Appcelerator, PhoneGap, and others resolve such imbroglio by offering several modules and extensions that bridge the gap between platforms, and also offer unique functionality not available elsewhere. Management systems such as parallels.com enable development teams to overcome common development issues, cutting across location.
The following are some of the new tools that give cross platform mobile application development a boost:
- Appcelerator, the mobile app development platform delivers native apps, with real-time mobile analytics
- PhoneGap utilizes the FOSS environment to create HTML and Java based apps, compatible with most OS landscape.
- Xamarin offers C# codebase and code-sharing functionality on multiple platforms
- RhoMobile’s Rhodes, an open source framework, facilitates cross-platform mobile application development based on Ruby.
- Kinvey offers a cloud-based backend service for developers
- Xojo offers maintenance-free web app hosting for businesses
- Dropsource offers automated programming to source code
- Corona Labs’ tool for building 2D educational and gaming apps supports all major platforms
- Yapp allows users to create personalized mobile apps
- Cocos2D enables creating 2D apps from a single code base, cutting across platforms
- GameSalad offers applied game development solutions in an easy drag-and-drop fashion, for cross-platform deployment
- BiznessApps allow small businesses to create and manage apps without any programming knowledge
- MobinCube, a drag and drop, web-based app builder, offer rich templates that cut across platforms
- Qt allows users to code in C++ and export the app to different platforms
These tools make creating apps very easy, and within the realms of even a novice, a big development from a few years ago when mobile app development required extensive coding, possible only though seasoned developers. The ease of development facilitated by these tools further plays into making cross platform mobile application development the preferred option.
A hybrid cross-platform app leverages the power of simplicity. However, the advantages realize only when development is done the right way. For instance, extensive customization may fritter away the gains from having only a code-base. In fact, faulty implementation that fritter away the advantages is the big reason why cross-platform development has not become the established norm yet. An experienced partner helps you gain the full benefits of cross-platform application development, keeping pitfalls at bay. Get in touch with us now to leverage the expertise of our talented team, and the wealth of experience we have accumulated over several cutting edge projects.
The impact of mobility goes much more than facilitating on-the-go online transactions. Mobility powered digital commerce has the potential to give a big boost to financial inclusion, throwing open banking facilities to people hitherto cut off from the same. At a macro level, it can propel growth, boosting the economy and the GDP of the country itself.
“Emerging economies,” such as India, Brazil, Philippines, and others are neither here nor there in terms of the economy. While such countries do have a strong banking system, generally the system is archaic in nature, with limited number of savings and credit products, and high fees. Moreover, a good chunk of the populace and small businesses, 1.6 billion people and 200 million micro, small and mid-size businesses to be precise, do not have access to such credit and savings products altogether. The mobile phone is a panacea to such woes, offering both the deprived and those already in the conventional banking system access to digital finance.
Digital payments and financial transactions, conducted through smartphones and other mobile devices are now a vital cog in the financial infrastructure of modern, developed economies such as the US and the Eurozone.
How Digital Finance Benefits
Digitization of financial transactions extends the traditional mobility benefits to finance, facilitating anywhere, anytime transactions, and flexibility in sending and receiving payments. It improves efficiency of the process, and offers a world of convenience as well. This apart, the widespread adoption and use of mobile phone powered digital finance is a win-win for everyone.
- Individuals and small businesses gain easy, wider, and often cheaper access to loans, over and above traditional and informal sources. McKinsey estimates an additional $2.1 trillion of loans would be available to individuals and small businesses, from current levels.
- Loan providers not just gain access to a whole new customer base, but also stand to save $400 billion a year in direct costs, considering digital accounts are 80% to 90% less expensive to service compared to traditional accounts. Overall, financial services providers could increase their balance sheets by an estimated $4.2 trillion.
- Digital finance can reduce leakages in collection of taxes, delivery of public services and transfer of subsidies. Governments gain a potential by $110 billion per year on these fronts.
- Service providers, such as telecommunications companies, payments providers, financial-technology start-ups, retailers, and others have a huge business opportunity on their hands. Even within banks and financial service providers, digital finance offers a new level playing field, giving everyone a more-or-less equal opportunity to establish dominance.
Consider the case of a farmer in rural India, who travels for kilometers and spends almost the whole day, just to make a utility payment. The same farmer gets paid just once or twice a year, during the time of crop harvest, but has no access to banks, to save the money. His business is highly risk-prone, at the mercy of monsoons or droughts, but he has no access to insurance. The smartphone can transform his life, by allowing him to accept payment in bank account, make utility payments in just a few minutes through the mobile wallet linked to the bank account, and likewise buy crop insurance on-the-fly.
Digital finance also allow small businesses integrate themselves to the formal mainstream economy, without being dependent on the local middleman. For instance, 70,000 small e-tailers from remote and desolate rural communities in China now sell on the Taobao marketplace, accepting payments digitally.
At a macro-level, digital financial inclusion has the potential to increase the GDPs of emerging economies by around 6%, or by $3.7 trillion, by 2025. This figure equals the size of Germany’s GDP. The resultant growth has the potential to employ 95 million people. The potential however varies from country to country, with countries such as India, Ethiopia and Nigeria having the potential to add as much as 10% to 12% to their GDP, whereas countries such as China, Brazil, and Mexico could add about 4% to 5% to their GDP.
The Long Road Ahead
Realization of such benefits was a long drawn out process in the developed countries, with digital finance maturing over time, in sync with the development of mobile internet infrastructure. Emerging economies can gain similar benefits while fulfilling the pressing need of financial inclusion, without going through similar efforts, since the mobile infrastructure is already in place in most parts of the world. About 80% of adults in emerging economies already have a mobile phone, whereas only 55% of them had a bank account, as on 2014.
However, there is still considerable ground to cover in most emerging economies before they can realize the full benefits of digital finance.
- Individuals may need to purchase a smartphone, or would need to upgrade their mobile phones. While this may sound obvious for the urban educated elite, it is still a tall ask for the rural poor, the primary targets of financial inclusion.
- Mobile service providers may need to roll out 3G and 4G networks over a wide area, before mobile powered digital finance can become widespread.
- Businesses would need to roll out digital financial products that offer better value and cost less than conventional financial tools and products. If they import digital financial products from the developed economies, they need to localize it as well, and ensure it meets local compliance regulations.
- Digital payments could unlock new finance and business models, such as peer-to-peer lending. There is a pressing need for regulatory innovation to facilitate such new models.
- There is also a need to change behavioral patterns and preferences, to make digital finance acceptable. NGOs or other agencies need to take the lead in educating the masses on smartphone usage and how to gain benefits from digital finance.
The onus is on the governments and stakeholder businesses to make a concerted and coordinated effort in such direction.
Efforts are already underway in several emerging economies to facilitate digital finance. For instance, in India, the “Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana” (PMJDY) aims to establish the backbone of digital payments initiative by opening bank accounts for all citizens.
However, much work still needs to be done. Financial and banking apps emerge as major conduits for digital finance transactions. Players who aim to grab a pie of the lucrative digital service market need to roll out intuitive apps that enable various possibilities and make digital transactions easy. It pays to partner with an established provider who have considerable experience in developing financial apps and software. We fit the bill perfectly on all counts, offering app and software solutions to enable your business gain new ground.
An elixir! But with a Pinch of Salt!
This ubiquitous realm of Digital has not only weaved new waves, but has also unlocked potential problems of its own. But then again, it is the problems when addressed in the right way that brings any technology to maturity. The mobile era for enterprises is still relatively young and the right efforts at the early stages can do a lot in shaping the technology to make it the reckoning power it can be. Enterprises need the reassurance that the potential challenges mentioned below can be dealt effectively, having lesser hassles as we move on into a truly mobile landscape.
Security
The influx of mobile device has given businesses the opportunity to expand into new areas and to get equipped with tools that previously did not exist. The scale still tilts in the direction of being cautious even with these possibilities. BYOD strategies have been reluctantly welcomed by organisations due to concerns of security and the possible increase in points of vulnerability. With mobile, a new kind of vulnerability of possible theft also becomes prominent. Such threats can lead to loss of corporate data, giving unauthorized access to the corporate network. Even though the scale tilts more dominantly to the side of being mobile wary, it shouldn’t be the case going forward. There can be protocols and inbuilt security that can stop a lot of security concerns but refraining from and educating the employees about risky interactions can help the corporates have better control.
Data Access
It is highly imperative that an employee working from the field is not limited to the data that he has. With concerns over security, mobile should not be an inferior option to the connected devices in the offices. Having limits on the way mobile can perform, defeats the purpose for which it stands for, rendering the capital spend for mobile strategy irrelevant. With a good mobile application development policy, data can be provided in real time with the IT having a secure control over it.
Enterprise Mobile Applications
Statistics tells us that employee productivity can increase by more than 30% with an enterprise mobile app. But the problem is, most organisations fail to tap into this productivity due to short-sightedness in the development of the app. The multitude of devices and the OS makes it difficult to build native apps for these diverse scenarios, this along with the lack of skilled developers and testing makes it a headache even with the right more profound. Hence it becomes imperative for organisations to take expert help for giving efficient, swift and functional mobile apps.
Supporting Mobile Workforce
Managing a remote workforce should also have a streamlined process through which IT can support them. The workforce irrespective of their location should be able to connect seamlessly in times of need to take required help from IT. This makes a strong network a default requirement make the enterprise mobility a success. The creation of a working environment in which employees can do what they do traditionally in an office space is the final litmus of a truly mobile workforce. They should not feel limited by the network, the device, the application or the security.
The Mobile strategy is here to stay, it becomes imperative for an organization to develop full-fledged, well-rounded apps that can deliver a consistent experience to the user. Granted using mobile has a few concerns, but these would get rectified along the way. There is no shying away from a mobile strategy especially with the exponential adoption of mobile devices all around, it only becomes a natural evolution of the workplace to rest within the hands of the employees in times to come.
While security remains a pressing concern in the mobility space in continental Europe, UX is now emerging as a bigger investment area, in the English-speaking world of UK and US.
The increasing investment in UX syncs with the preferences of today’s highly demanding customers, who value a hassle-free engagement, without having to struggle to consume information. Even users of enterprise apps now expect a visual appeal, or UX similar to what they find with games and other consumer apps.
Traditionally, UX and security have been inversely linked, with improvements in security often getting in the way of UX. For instance, the common requirement of having to reset password once in two weeks makes the account more secure, but impede usability. Similarly, blocking file download from an unknown IP address may prevent a hacker from accessing the data, but also prevents the user from accessing his own data when he needs it, on the move.
The best security is invisible, working away in the background, keeping digital assets safe without the user even noticing the workings. While the ground reality is far from such an ideal state in most enterprises, there is now growing realization that the tendency to push in too many security features, especially in an already stressed mobility space, can drive away users, or worse, prompt them to seek out loopholes.
The solution, however, is not to throw security out with the UX bathwater, but rather deliver a seamless UX yet uncompromising on any security considerations. This requires a change of approach, best exemplified by an allegory of locks. While the existing approach resembles adding more number of locks to a door, which while keeping trespassers away also makes it more difficult for the genuine user to get it, the new approach tries to offer only a single, but an unbreakable lock. Mobility investments are flowing in this direction.
One way to reconcile security with UX is the “security by design” approach, or building in security early in the development process, rather than co-opt it as an awkward extra layer in the end, akin to manufacturing a door with a deadbolt lock built-in rather than affixing locks after installing the door.
But what exactly is the difference, one may be left wondering?
Consider an approach where users need to enter their login credentials every time and access to a specific section or resource depends on the credentials provided and another approach where there is a tight control on what each and every user can see, based on a need-to-see basis incorporated at the design stage itself. A user, rather than being prevented from peeking at data, not for their eyes, may not be served with means to access to such data in the first place. For example, the sales team may be given an app that offers all sales data, but not information that pickers in the warehouse access through their apps, and managers have another set of apps, offering a far wider range of data and information.
Another approach to reconciling the divide between security and UX is through the hardware. A case in point is Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner and similar systems on Android smartphones. When hardware becomes the trusted security medium, UX can be spared from having to authenticating users. The assumption, of course, is only the right users will have access to the hardware in the first place.
Yet another approach is not to break it, but explain it. At times, there’s no workaround for a security procedure that impedes a smooth UX. In fact, focusing too much on usability may be counter-intuitive, for what is the easiest and most convenient may not be in the best interests of security. A confusing interface may best be solved with a tutorial, a FAQ page, or some help videos, rather than breaking the interface for the sake of UX and impede security in the process. There is also the issue of writing earning message in a way users understand, focusing on the implications of an unsafe action, rather than harping on technical jargon.
Security is all-important, but only if there are users available in the first place. A poor UX in today’s highly demanding and competitive age would simply drive away users, making rigid security protocols self-defeating and redundant. Developers are widening up to this all-important logjam and investing big in UX, but such focus should be with the understanding that UX and security aren’t necessarily at odds, and the duo even benefits each other.
Your best bet in developing state of the art mobility software that offers the best of both worlds is partnering with us. Our experienced and versatile team of developers understand both UX issues and security considerations and help you roll out software and apps that fit the bill perfectly.
In today’s hyper-connected age, with people always on the move, one would think not developing enterprises mobility solution is akin to the company shooting itself on the foot. Yet many companies hesitate to develop mobility solutions, wary as they are about misconceptions associated with it.
Here are the top six myths related to enterprise mobility solutions.
Myth # 1: Legacy Software is Too Entrenched to Displace
Legacy software is often the whipping boy for enterprises who refrain from developing mobility solutions. A key accusation is legacy software draining IT budgets, making it hard to fund new software.
The reality is that developing new mobility software doesn’t require massive investment. In fact, today’s rapidly advancing mobile solution landscape makes it possible to develop mobility solutions with little or no programming skills, with a fraction of the cost, time, and effort it takes to develop traditional solutions.
The problem comes when many enterprises try to throw in more servers as the solution to every IT problem they confront. Smart enterprises simply leverage scalable and affordable cloud-based solutions, which does not involve CAPEX costs.
Moreover, investment in mobility solutions often pays back for itself quickly, as mobility allows the company to become lean and mean, and spare the costs required to maintain legacy systems.
Myth #2: Enterprise Silos Make Mobility Solutions a Non-Starter
Most organizations that have been around for a while live with data and software silos. Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance, and other teams all use different tools, and operate disparate enterprise systems.
While data silos are indeed a drag and removing it can be game-changers for enterprise transformation, silos needn’t necessarily come in the way of developing mobility solutions. Installing a remote desktop server on the legacy system makes it easy to access data on it. If the legacy system doesn’t allow remote access, it is obsolete anyway. Also, many mobility apps can actually live with silos, and when information is required cutting across silos, there are several cost-effective analytic solutions now available that can access data from different silos and collate it in the cloud.
Myth#3: Potential Disruptions Create More Havoc than the Gains Mobility Brings
Many companies are inspired by the famous adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and refuse to dabble with mobility solution, least the upgrade disrupts what is already working. They consider the difficulty of migrating legacy business software and data, the downtime it causes to business critical processes, and the possible need to overhaul data center hardware and software. While such challenges were indeed big stumbling blocks in the past, the advancement of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions solve much of these issues. SaaS upgrades are in most cases done overnight, and does not require investment in new hardware or software.
Myth#4: Password Overload and Other Ills Breed End-User Resentment
No enterprise initiative succeeds with the support and cooperation of end-users. While enterprise mobility help end-user employees in many ways, they often raise concern about having to remember many passwords for the various enterprise apps they need to access. They forget passwords and raise tickets, dragging IT resources for account recovery.
While the concern is genuine, easy solutions are also available, most notably in the form of unified, easy single sign-on (SSO). Using SSO, a user needs to login just once, to gain access to all systems. SSO even facilitates integration with the user’s Google Account, or the credentials used to access Microsoft Office 365.
Myth #5: Inadequate Training and Support Doom Implementation
A common grouse against new solutions in general and mobility solutions in particular, is employees not getting enough training on enterprise apps to be productive.
The problem is actually misplaced, and has to do more with the design of the mobility solution than lack of training. Mobile apps are primarily meant to be easy, explicit, and self-evident. A “kitchen sink” (all-encompassing solution) mobile app, replicating the features and functionality of desktop applications rarely succeeds as it just combines the worst of both worlds. The ideal enterprise mobile apps rather contain just a few key functions, focusing on a specific process, and come with limited navigational choices and simple UX, primed for quick access.
Lopez Research Enterprise Mobility Benchmark estimate 60% of companies allowing BYOD, meaning employees would be familiar with device in the first place.
Myth #6: Enterprise Mobility Solutions are a Security Nightmare.
About one in every three companies had their sensitive data compromised through lost or stolen devices. To counter such damning statistics, most enterprises take inspiration from the adage “If you are not there to be hit, you cannot be hit,” and limit mobile access.
Security risks associated with mobility software are real, but also blown out of proportion. A big majority of the victims are either careless, or the company had weak security standards in the first place. Making risk management a key focus within the overall mobility strategy, and deploying effective mobile device management protocols, in combination with advanced encryption, modern authentication mechanisms, and even analytics mitigate most risks, and make mobility solution as safe as on-premises software.
Enterprises are waking up to the need to embarking on a sound mobility strategy, dispelling the myths associated with mobility. Lopez Research Enterprise Mobility Benchmark reveals 68% of companies ranking mobile-enabling the business as a top concern for 2015, a concern surpassed only by securing corporate data, and more than half of the companies planning to build 10 or more enterprise mobile apps in 2016.
Get in touch with us to fine tune your mobile strategy and develop state of the art mobile apps. Our cutting-edge enterprise mobility solutions not just enable your workforce to access much needed critical information anytime and anywhere, but also increase productivity and efficiency, and help you streamline your processes towards facilitating the customer.
Field service is an industry which owes a large margin of its improvements to mobile applications. It has been leveraging mobile applications for a number of its functions and aspects for quite some time now and organizations have already replaced all of their heavy paper based processes with smart mobile applications. Most of them also continue to migrate their software as well as services and storage to the cloud, by which they allow the emails, photos, documents and other important information to be accessed from anywhere in the world.
According to a research by IDC, the world’s mobile workforce is likely to have grown to 1.3 billion this year. And the American region, including the United States, Canada and Latin America are likely to have seen an increase in their mobile workers from 182.5 million in 2010 to 212.1 million in 2015, with North America in the lead for the largest number of mobile workers at 75% of the total mobile workforce in 2010.
Such being the level at which mobile workers are increasing, there is also going to be an increase in the number of mobile devices connected to the internet, which according to Gartner is likely to be more than 30 billion in number by 2020, generating almost $2 trillion as an economic value worldwide.
That said, since mobile connectivity with the internet is rapidly increasing worldwide, it is about time that field service personnel also utilized mobile applications and start becoming a part of the mobile workforce.
As a matter of fact, the field service industry is one which has a million functions and opportunities to make them automated with mobile apps. It is indeed critical now for them to keep up with the changes and embrace mobility. Using a fully integrated field service management software has to be followed up with a mobile app as well. Read this blog to know the advantages
The field service industry actually needs mobile apps more than any industry
Field agents are almost always on the move, traveling from one job site to another. And they always need access to customer information, invoices, work order information, product or tools information and the like, most often in real-time. Since they go from one place of service to the next continuously, they might need information on their next work order and their next customer as well on the go.
A well-designed mobile app can help them simplify these processes and get things done in a more efficient and organized manner. Since it is cloud-based, it allows the field agents to pull up any information instantly from wherever they are. Hence, it avoids redundant phone calls to find the whereabouts of the agents or the job site and also any delay in information exchange.
It also helps to simplify communication between the field service agents, the providers, and the customers. Many a time, field service personnel have faced challenges in communicating with their team, especially when there are several agents traveling to a particular job site simultaneously. The right mobile app helps in effective communication and better coordination among these agents. This is especially true in case of companies that provide round-the-clock maintenance and inspection support. They definitely need a communication system that spans beyond regular telephonic calls, so that they don’t have to go through the ordeal of making a landline office phone call or enter passcodes and numbers every time that have to connect with someone. They need a system with advanced features that allow seamless communication between field service personnel.
It helps to eliminate human errors arising from manual data entry or paper-based data entry processes as well, which again adds to the effectiveness and efficiency of the organization as a whole.
Added benefits
Most field service mobile apps have many added benefits as well for the field agents, such as:
- Ability to access information related to work history and forthcoming jobs so that they can do the necessary preparations
- Ability to capture photos and signatures while they are on site
- Ability to go through and review their assigned tasks and accept or reject them according to their skills and expertise or time schedule
- An in-built navigation tool that will help them find the most efficient and appropriate route to their job site, thereby reducing travel time
- Ability to request for assistance or advice to other nearby co-workers, while they are on site and ensure that they fix the issue properly
Apart from these, there are a number of additional benefits that are designed to address the many problems that can arise in field service.
For example, there could be chances for last-minute plan or schedule changes, as technicians are always moving from one job to the next. Moreover, external factors like weather problems, traffic and power failure can also cause delay and even render the field agents from reaching the assigned location.
Field service mobile apps have advanced features to track the whereabouts of the workers in real-time and even determine the time required for him to complete a job he is currently at. Hence, the service providers can assign tasks based on the location, current job, skills and expertise of the technicians. Being cloud-based, all the team members can have access to the location of the supervisors or technicians or the customers from anywhere.
Enterprise Mobile Applications
According to a study by the Aberdeen group, “best-in-class” mobile apps are capable of completing about 1.5 times as much work on a mobile device as the industry average and also achieving an average of 40% increase in operational efficiency every year. As a matter of fact, the right mobile apps or the “best-in-class”, can do more than just mobilizing already existing enterprise software. A well-developed and a well-enforced mobile app strategy can actually act as a catalyst for improving coordination and effective communication, hastening the decision-making process and increase the overall operational efficiency of the organization as a whole.
On top of all that, as data gets collected from multiple sources and processes through mobile apps, there is also a chance of collating these and extracting greater, more useful information in the future.
Big data
Field service agents, as well as the providers have access to all information related to their jobs at one place. For the same reason, they have the opportunity to analyze and determine new trends and patterns and use it to make significant changes. For example, field agents assigned to follow up routine maintenance works on appliances and the like, can track the data collected from these works with the help of specialized mobile apps and use it to predict the next maintenance requirement. Hence, rather than fixing issues after they occur, field agents can utilize predictive analysis to be proactive in their approach.
On the whole, there are a number of unique features that mobile field service apps can provide to increase productivity and efficiency of the field service industry itself. It is high time that field service organizations (who have not already adopted mobile apps), encouraged mobility and started using feature-rich mobile applications to solve their day-to-day challenges.
Are you looking to adopt the perfect mobile solution for your field service business? Contact us to talk to our mobile application experts.
Gone are the days when people used to be tied to their work desks for long hours through the week and be stuck at specific places for meetings and discussions. Corporates have moved away from traditional ways of communication, both formal and informal, towards a more dynamic and versatile approach. Thanks to the concept of enterprise mobility, people can work as well as communicate with each other sitting anywhere in the world.
For a long time though, mobility has always been a part of businesses, as earlier, there were IP (Initiation Protocol) and SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for use in office and hence were limited in scope. For advanced needs and requirements in an enterprise, mobility needs to grow and it is already starting to take new forms in the process. With the increased use of smartphones and tablets in business, enterprises are now able to increase their productivity as well as efficiency. Now, let’s take a look at the main areas where mobility is being extensively used these days:
- Sales – Whether it is an FMCG manufacturer or a financial services company, the sales team is something that is invariably always on the move. The sales representatives who work in their respective fields may face several challenges like:
– High costs of paperwork, unnecessary phone calls and visits
– Manual paper-based recording of sales order entries, which is time-consuming and error-prone
– Inability to provide demo on site to clients
– Lack of easy access to customer information
Hence, they need mobile apps that can make their work easier by improving communication access and increasing employee productivity. - Services – In services, enterprise mobility helps to reduce the cycle time, which can be a key differentiator for service providers. Cycle time refers to the time from the service request initiation to service request closure. In other words, the time starting from the beginning of your process to the end, as decided by you and your customers. For example, the time from when a customer places a phone call to the electrician, to the time he fixes the fault and closes the service request. With enterprise mobility, such phone calls and placing of service requests can be made much easier and faster.
Opportunities
The business opportunities that ensue from enterprise mobility are manifold. As mentioned earlier, it can improve the productivity of an enterprise by a large margin if implemented properly. Some of them are:
- Mobility first business processes – Enterprise mobility helps to promote competitive differentiation by providing value using a mobile first strategy to business processes creation and management. It thus adds to the efficiency of each process and in turn the efficiency of the organization as a whole.
- Knowledge management – It helps to capture explicit and tacit knowledge through the analysis of data generated from mobile devices. It also helps to provide context-based knowledge solutions.
- CYOD – Mobility promotes the latest business trend of Choose Your Own Device (CYOD) which improves employee satisfaction and that too at a reasonable IT spend.
- Productivity improvements in niche areas too – Custom-built apps hosted on the enterprise app store can support business teams working on non-commoditized processes to improve productivity and add more value.
Even though enterprise mobility is a rapidly growing phenomenon among business enterprises these days, there are certain challenges that hinder its full-fledged adoption sometimes.
Challenges to Enterprise mobility
Due to several reasons, enterprise mobility is not acceptable by some business officials and enterprises. They are:
- Connectivity – The concept of enterprise mobility revolves around the ability for employees and the management to stay connected at all times. It is all about making information available to the right people at the right time. Without connectivity, the whole concept becomes ineffective and useless.
- Devices – Devices that are being used in offices need to have the capability to deliver (and hence enable consumption) of complex information, in other words, rich media content. Rich media is a web-based terminology used in internet advertizing to describe web advertisements that utilize advanced technology like video streaming, and are also able to interact with the user immediately. For example, ads that change or react as the user’s mouse hovers over it.
- User experience – For the employees, who are used to and are experienced in traditional methods of communication, such a drastic change might not be such a welcome one. Besides, they might find it difficult to adapt themselves to the new concept, which could affect productivity.
- Security – Since with mobility, everything from backups to encryption is “on the go”, it also is quite vulnerable to loss of information. And since employees carry around their entire office in their mobile devices, losing their device means losing their office.
- Environmental sustainability – Most telecom companies use diesel to fuel their base stations and data centres. As a matter of fact, the telecom industry is one of the largest consumers of diesel. Hence, it is not quite environmentally sustainable.
However, in this fast-paced business environment, mobility is starting to be an inevitable factor for the success of businesses, whether it is accepted by employees or not. The disadvantages are often out ruled by its pros and conveniences. From the way things are, it doesn’t seem too long before it becomes a way of life.