Category: Technology

Prep Up for the New Overtime Regulations! Go Digital!

One of the biggest changes that the business world has seen in the recent years, is the rapid rise in social media usage. It started off as a passing fad among the youth, and then went on to become one of the most powerful medium of communication and marketing, among businesses.

To be specific, there are about 1.55 billion active users on Facebook on a monthly basis, which basically accounts for 1 in 5 people. That explains, why it has so much of an influence, right?

You are probably in terms with this social media surge in business by now. Here let’s talk about another similar big change that is about to happen again in the business scenario- the recently updated overtime regulations.

Overtime Regulations

Just to quickly sum it up, the Department of Labor, recently made a significant change in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), by which a large number of employees that were classified as exempt, will be facing the changes. This means that a lot of employees who previously did not have to track their work time, will have to from now with >overtime, and will have to punch in and punch out like regular employees, with effect from December 1, 2016.

Much to the surprise of many SMBs, this amendment is indeed going to affect many of their employees, especially those whose salaries come near the margin of $47,476 per annum.

While this may prove to be an expensive regulation to comply with for many organizations, not keeping up to speed on the same is likely to cost a lot more.

According to several estimates, almost 70% of businesses are not compliant with even the existing FLSA, because of which they have had to suffer the most number of lawsuits with regard to wages. This was because a lot of employees had been misclassified as exempt, and had been missing out on overtime.

What you can do to keep up

To save yourself from such trouble, it is crucial for your business to automate your timecards. Before getting on to that thought, here are some tips:

• Make proper note of which of your employees are covered by the new rule. According to the new rule, even those employees who had previously been exempt, and earn less than $47,476 will be covered. You might want to check with your attorney about this.
• You might want to start tracking their work hours, even though the rule doesn’t come into effect until this December, so that you get a base record of their work time.
• You need to get a proper strong automated system in place, instead of those paper-based time cards, as they are no longer effective, slow down the whole process and can get you in line for lawsuits.

A good and accurate, cloud-based automated attendance system is the right way to go.

Since the timesheets and cards can be filled in by employees right from their mobile devices, it gets updated on the supervisor or manager’s system immediately, and hence everyone is in the loop, as to the worker’s timings. There are several other advantages of using a digital system.

Here are some:

Automatic Update on Accounts

As the whole system of attendance gets automated and each of the devices, like the ones with the employees,  the ones with the managers and the centralized office system, are all integrated into a comprehensive mechanism, it becomes easy for all users to monitor the data. The same systems can also be linked to your accounting system, which makes the calculation of wages all the more effective.

Audit Trail

An integrated attendance system helps to maintain a proper audit trail, in case of any issues or complaints related to non-compliance of regulations. At the event of an audit, you will be able to pull up all the information and documentation you need, in a matter of minutes.

Accuracy

As the new regulation involves paying all workers who earn below the new threshold, for any overtime hours worked, you need to have an accurate track of the hours worked by your employees. It is pretty much impossible to achieve a good level of accuracy with paper-based systems. They are prone to human errors and of course, loss of data.

Decision Support

By having access to all accurate information on employee working hours, you get to take better, more informed decisions on their compensation. As the relevant authority on the matter, you can effectively remunerate the deserving employees, based on real-time evidence.

With all the above benefits, you can easily handle the huge change that is just around the corner, and any other changes that may come up, in the face of uncertainty.

According to the Aberdeen Group, companies that shift to an automated attendance system, are likely to witness huge benefits including a 100% increase in human capital ROI. It also led to a 32% decline in unplanned overtime.

December 1st is just a few months away. Now is the time to make the shift to automated time cards and get well acquainted with the new changes. Talk to our software experts to get a better idea of the whole digital attendance system, and get started.

Many enterprises use Microsoft SharePoint for day-to-day collaboration, and also to develop web-based business applications.

Though originally launched and sold as a document management and storage system, Microsoft SharePoint is highly configurable and it makes sense to use the platform for developing powerful apps that fulfill key business processes.

While many developers are content with Microsoft’s 40+ SharePoint 3.0 application templates that offer out-of-the-box solutions for specific business processes, such as tracking marketing campaigns, and Help Desk coordination, several others require deep customization beyond what such templates offer.  Today’s highly dynamic business world, where businesses try to seek competitive advantage through innovation, places a premium on flexible business application solutions. Many developers use the out-of-the-box templates as starting points for deep customization, while others develop their own custom templates from scratch, using Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007.

Regardless of the approach, here are ways to enhance SharePoint application development capabilities, to further such ends.

Leverage Collaboration Features

A key USP of SharePoint is the plethora of collaborative features on offer that enhances the functionality of applications developed using the platform.

The top collaborative option is Community Sites, modeled on Facebook, allowing employees, hitherto working on silos, to communicate with one another in new ways, such as based on shared interests, rather than on the basis of departmental affiliation. App developers could enhance the worth of such communities by adding micro-blogging, news feeds, tagging and other features. News feeds make available updates from others, notifies about changes made to documents and websites, and overall keeps the user in the loop of things.

“My Sites,” another popular collaboration option, allow users to upload documents. Enabling this feature allows an always-on-the-move employee to sync the contents of the library, in one or more systems, and access it offline.

Yet another popular collaboration tool, OneDrive for Business, enables storing digital documents in a central cloud-based repository, facilitating easy access and share.

Applying the right mix of collaborative features in application development facilitate free flow of information and open communication, which in turn encourage sharing of experiences and enable better decision-making capabilities.

Offer Deep Integration with Enterprise Communication

SharePoint’s collaboration features extend to offer deep integration with the available enterprise communication infrastructure.

Developers may leverage the easy integration with Skype and Lync to offer a powerful way to communicate with customers and colleagues, without leaving the platform. The functionality may also be used to make explicit the full contact information of participants, during online meetings.

The “Site Mailbox” feature creates a shared project space, allowing users to create a common pool of emails and documents. Storage, retrieval, and editing of files become very easy, through drag and drop.

Leverage the Improved Search Functionality

The revamped search core in SharePoint 2013 features FAST Search, a powerful search engine that operates within company networks, and makes it very easy for users to search and locate stashed away enterprise content, including query results from multiple locations, authored documents, information on previous projects, contact information, and more. SharePoint also co-opts Microsoft Bing capabilities, offering end users a seamless and easy out of the box (OOTB) experience.

Developers may leverage the advanced search capabilities to offer content by search, continuous crawl and for general performance enhancement.

Provide Mobile Functionality

Microsoft offered native mobile functionality in SharePoint 2007 and 2010 version, but these options were weak, and best forgotten. SharePoint 2013 however makes amends by introducing a slew of mobile tools.

• A new “contemporary view” that renders site in HTML5 offers better mobile browsing experience, including touch-screen interaction.
• New back-end mobile “channels” automatically rearrange SharePoint site rendering for different mobile devices.
• Geo-location tags, news feeds, push notification to alert users on new content, and improved viewing of MS-Office documents offer even more convenience and unlock new possibilities for the mobile.

Several third-party apps, such as Colligo email manager, Infragistics SharePlus, Filamente, and Harmon make the SharePoint mobile experience better, and more responsive

Extend Collaboration to Enterprise Social Networking

Much of SharePoint’s collaborative features, such as community sites and the enhanced search capabilities are already modeled to facilitate enterprise social networking. Developers seeking to further social collaboration may explore enterprise social networking (ESN) suites such as NewsGator and Jive Software that connect seamlessly to SharePoint, and offer mobile capabilities to ESN.

Leverage Other Niche Capabilities

SharePoint 2013 offers a host of other intuitive features, such as new document set features, automatic translations to multiple languages, managing discovery cases and holds, improved caching and more, all offering considerable scope for performance improvements. Features such as metadata navigation, n URL, and image rendition improve SEO.

As it is with all initiatives, success in the quest of enhancing SharePoint application development depends on customization based on business needs. For instance, if social collaboration functionality is added just because everyone else seems to be doing so, the initiative is bound to end in failure.

SharePoint now offers easy drag and drop feature, requiring minimal code, but it still makes sense to partner with us to enhance your SharePoint development capabilities. Our team of skilled and experienced developers have already seen it in action in enterprise setting and can guide you to move forward in the best way.

Many businesses regard IT as a cost center, not offering any tangible returns for the dollar spend. Such reasoning may seem misplaced in today’s tech-centric age where more and more people are online, and technology creeps into almost all business processes. However, such misgivings may not be off the mark when factoring in the current state of IT in many enterprises.

Enterprises need to apply technology solutions the right way to realize potential gains from IT, with a coherent technology strategy for realizing business goals. This is a far cry from the present reality in many organizations where IT, rather than fulfilling its anticipated role as a key business enabler, is caught in a “process trap,” and a spending black hole.
Adopt these strategies to ensure IT investments create value.

Leverage Technology Solutions to Optimize Resources

It is a dog fight out there for new customers, in today’s highly competitive business environment. Most businesses are under stress to improve their margins. Margins can improve by increasing revenue, which is tough, and by reducing expenditure, which technology solutions can enable.

Automating manual tasks, doing away with time-consuming and man-hour intensive processes is among the core mandate of software. Reducing operational costs by eliminating waste and inefficiency, reducing cycle times, accurate invoicing, and more, all brought about by automation and process improvements, adds direct value, and contribute tangibly to the bottom line.

Today’s enterprises can further go beyond such basics, and leverage emerging technologies such as BYOD, big data and mobility solutions to offer technology solutions that empower the workforce to collaborate anytime, anywhere, with seamless access to data.  Such interventions streamline day to day activities, and increase productivity.  Marketing automation alone offers a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead. Application of technology solutions to other areas would realize similar, if not greater, gains

The cloud, with its scalable subscriptions, offer scope for big savings, sparing enterprises the hassles and costs of setting up their costly on-premises servers and other solutions, more so when demand for such resources may be seasonal.  Companies could move workloads such as web and email to cloud hosts to overcome the network bandwidth challenges they face.

Enhance Security

IT has the potential to add direct value in security and regulatory compliance front as well. Using software to cross-check whether various checks and balances are in place to ensure compliance reduces the drag on available resources. Aggregating data from various sources to generate compliance reports automatically allow the workforce to focus more on their core activities. Over and above such regulatory mandates, developing an effective network strategy, complete with encryption, network monitoring, and other protocols, as appropriate, keeps the network safe from data thieves, intellectual property bandits, ransomware gangs, and threats of various hues lurking in the cyberspace.

Non-compliance and breach can attract huge fines, besides other damages. Breaches cost global companies $3.79 million, and 60% of business closes within six months of a major data breach. Adopting a technology strategy on this front offers an effective safeguard against such disasters.

Promote Innovation

A big drag with IT is a huge slice of the budget, as high as 70% to 80%, invariably spend on maintaining existing assets, leaving very little on the table for innovation and transformational activities.

A break-out from this logjam require widening the focus to explore new technology, new products, new vendors, and new partners, aimed at identifying new solutions that enable the company  overcome historic barriers of cost and geography. At the very least, focus on discovering newer cost-effective solutions and delivery channels to replace incumbent solutions. The added bonus with such efforts may be solutions to break into new markets or leapfrog competitors.

In other words, reposition the technology strategy from the usual “on-demand service provider,” to IT becoming a strategic partner in the company’s quest for innovation and growth.  

Invest in Transformational Capabilities

New and emerging technologies such as cloud computing, big data, analytics, IoT, and more offer scope for not just transforming business processes, but also for unlocking new business opportunities. For instance, deploying analytic tools that generate deep insight from transaction data makes marketing more efficient, while deploying predictive analytic tools to anticipate customer needs enables marketers to go one-up on competition and increase sales.

However, businesses would also do well to be aware that there’s a lot of snake oil being sold in the form of new technologies and strike partnerships with established and credible solution providers. We offer a host of cutting-edge technology solutions that allow your business to become more efficient, and your workforce to become more productive. Partner with us to formulate a technology strategy that would ensure your IT investments truly add value, and transform your business.

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.

By the late 1980’s the prominent sound of  “ding, ding, zip” of the typewriters that reverbed through the office halls gave way for a softer, mimicked,  mechanical feel of the typewriters. The computer keyboards with time evolved, making it the familiar yet a distinct avatar of the faithful typewriters of the past. What changed was more than just the mechanical clinker in the office halls; they gave rise to a new status quo on how work was performed and what could be achieved by ideally leveraging the computers.

A Digital Revolution

A little bit of reflection on the successful business of our times like Facebook, WhatsApp, Zynga, Twitter, Square, Netflix,  points to the fact that, these companies were either born digital or made efforts to alter their business to becoming digital. The companies that innovated, the ones that laid the old to rest, followed a process of creative destruction. What businesses have to remember is that, most of the times the employees and the customers have got a faster affinity to adapt to changing technology. This adoption would only be followed by an expectation that the business that they interact with, also follows suit. For B2B players it becomes important that they use Mobile, Big Data, IoT, 5G, and augmented reality for revolutionising the customer experience, optimising operational and industrial processes, innovating rapidly, bringing faster cash cycles, driving employee productivity and for improved service enhancements.

Statistics shows that there would be 6.1 billion smartphone users worldwide, 56% of all web traffic is through mobile and the global mobile data traffic is expected to reach 6.2 Exabytes/ month! That’s a lot of numbers indicating the importance of a Mobile strategy.

Digital Business Transformation through Mobility

Mobility is not just about going wireless. It focuses on the business process and the work models that effectively utilise mobile. Internally it is about the business models and processes that can enable marketing, HR and operations to utilise the benefits of going mobile like improved and faster decision making, increased productivity of the employees, faster resolution of internal issues, brand perception enhancements, reduced sales cycle time and increased revenues. But there are concerns of network security, compatibility and security of the devices, corporate and customer data security, regulatory requirements that always make the C-Suite executives think twice before they tread on these unsure waters.

Transforming a business through mobility has to have a well-rounded view of the entire business and a thorough recognition of the priorities of going mobile. It can be as simple as supporting more mobile handheld devices, extending internal systems for mobile access, offering incremental BYOD, providing more mobile support to the customer, implementing corporate mobility policies and so on. With Mobility, work becomes something that people do and not a place they go to, it has the capability to bring transformations with regards to:

Increased Revenue Potential

Mobility is pervasive and the ever trusted smartphone has led the march, becoming the go-to device, people use for work, pleasure or to kill boredom. Living in the comfort of your pockets, the mobile becomes the first medium of choice for one to interact with the outside world. This gives business a chance to connect to the customers at any point of time. Similarly, mobile apps that can help the customer consume products and services would invariably help to increase revenues. Employee empowerment and customer engagement are the two critical interactions for a business to make. Having a solid mobile strategy would help them both to be connected on the move, thus effectively enabling contracts and deals closures on real-time.

Flexibility

The first signs of going digital would be improved employee freedom. An employee would no longer be restricted to the cubicles, instead he/she will get a chance to work on ‘wherever whenever’ style. Through cloud-based applications, the staff would be able to access resources and attend to important work, no matter where they are. Such apps are now even built with offline connectivity that can help the field workers to sync things later into the cloud while effectively helping them perform their work. Reach out is one such app that has been developed with the offline connectivity, for managing work orders and jobs in inspection and audits. This goes a long way into providing flexibility, responsiveness and faster turnaround times, which in the end translate to excellent customer satisfaction. This sets up a win-win for both the customer and the business as it enhances the way you work and the way the business serves the customers need.

Collaboration

Another major contributor to employee productivity is the way mobility enables workplace collaboration, regardless of the physical proximity of individuals and teams. When effective collaboration is required among individuals and teams spread across multiple locations, mobile truly makes the effort more streamlined and natural. Cloud-based enterprise collaboration software can help teams to break down barriers of location and time, bringing the best of talents to work in unison.

Communication

With the flexible and collaborative nature of work, there comes a need of precise and timely communication that can draw the line between being successful or crashing out. It becomes highly essential that the mobile workforce is appraised with relevant metrics that help them to take the right decision and also to update crucial project updates. Aware mobility helps to accelerate performance by having this view of important metrics right on your trusted iOS or Android device. This can help to get on time information that helps you take that important decision when required.

Operational Efficiency and Productivity

Businesses would have to change the way they have conducted themselves over the years. They would need to get re-organised, to accommodate the task oriented usage style of mobile users and deliver them efficiently, without having any security concerns. Real time statistics of location and direction have already helped logistics and field service, to come up with strategic ways in which these could be leveraged. This leveraging should ideally result from a re-envisioned business process. Mobilisation of Salesforce interactions, supply chain management and innovative charging models can be devised by having mobile at the hub of the transformation, for a truly digital organization.

Business leaders, often focusing on the immediate and the more pressing, relegate internal processes to the secondary. As a result, inefficiencies of various hues creep in, over time.

Inefficiencies manifest in many ways. Business processes and systems may be aligned to suit the technology rather than technology being applied to conduct business in the most seamless way. Additional processes may have come up to complete a part of the original process. Often, critical gaps in business processes and data silos make employees struggle to find the right information, or the right tools. The Boston Consulting Group estimates the amount of “procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals” having increased by anywhere from 50 percent to 350 percent over the last fifteen years, in US and European companies, with managers spending as much as 40% of their time writing reports, and 30% to 60% of their time coordination meetings! The net result is invariably business executives having to work harder than necessary.

One knee-jerk reaction when such inefficiencies become too disruptive to be ignored is automation. However, mere automation of inefficient processes only accentuates waste. While automation is indeed a step in the right direction, businesses need to also make their processes smarter.

Here are a few ways in which business processes can be tweaked to enable working smart instead of working hard.

1. Standardize processes, but one size does not always fit all. What works well in one division may not work well for the company overall. 3M found this out the hard way when they applied Six Sigma not just in accounting, but across-the-board, resulting in stifled innovation in a company where innovation is the key USP.
2. Innovate. A 2011 PwC study reports 80% of CEOs believing innovation to drive efficiencies and providing a competitive advantage.
3. Leverage on-demand and scalable cloud solutions such as PaaS and IaaS to optimize resources, reduce costs, create innovative products and services, and add value to existing business systems.
4. Apply technology to tighten collaboration between stakeholders, including customers. Celina Insurance Group implemented a highly collaborative extranet to bring the company employees, 500+ independent agents and customers closer, and offer easy access to all relevant information, resulted in massive gains.
5. Integrate the supply chain with business processes, across the value-chain, in real time, to connect people with the information they require. Diary major Danone reduced the timeline of its production optimization plans from two days to a mere 15 minutes now, by updating and integrating its production planning and scheduling technology.
6. Leverage analytics to get a 360-degree view, and derive value, from available data. Apply emerging technologies to unlock data and information resident in physical and digital systems, and subject such data to analytics. Ensure such new intelligence is readily available to those in a position to use it, and actionable to make better decisions.
7. Enable a mobile workforce capable of collaborating anytime from anywhere. Today’s executives and customers are always on the move. Mobile apps and workflows save time, improve efficiency, and also unlock new possibilities.

About 70% of CEOs invest in IT to reduce costs and to become more efficient, and 54% of them focus on growth initiatives powered by emerging technologies such as mobility. About 80% of manufacturing businesses expect mobile apps to increase their productivity by at least six percent. Mobile phones powered by cloud-based storage and apps allow employees to save a whopping 57 minutes a day, on average.

Smart employees are already up to the task. They often cobble up their own solutions, taking advantage of the tons of resources available online, when existing business resources do not meet their requirements. About 90% of all employees use cloud-based services, such as Skype and LinkedIn, for their work, and 79% of employees use cloud-based file sharing and collaboration tools, such as Dropbox or Microsoft OneDrive. Needless to say, such improvisations do not do away with all inefficiencies and come with grave security and data privacy risks.

Businesses need to facilitate smart employees by developing custom apps that automate workflows, provide digital forms, and sync offline data. A major stumbling block is the extensive time and resources that development of new custom apps requires. IT departments, already hard-pressed to keep existing systems running, often find the task of designing and updating apps that need to work with multiple platforms and disparate devices, too onerous. The solution is to partner with experienced providers, who not only make available complete and customized solutions, but also chips in with their specialized expertise and experience, to realise smart business processes.

Partnering with us allows you to have the best of both worlds – ability to roll out apps that leverage the latest cutting edge technology to enable smart business processes, without straddling your already overburdened and resource-crunched IT team with more responsibilities. 

Steve Jobs’s April 2010 prophecy of mobile devices replacing desktops and laptops as the computing devices of choice is now coming true. More people now access the internet using their mobile devices, compared to desktops or laptops. This has its effect in e-commerce as well.
M-commerce is now 34% of all ecommerce transactions, and expected to grow at 31% in 2017. Overall e-commerce is slated to grow at just 15% in the same period, meaning m-commerce is slated to grow 200% faster. Goldman Sachs estimates the total value of m-commerce at $626 billion by 2018, by which time m-commerce would account for half of all e-commerce transactions.

The reason for the surge in m-commerce is obvious. More and more people now prefer the convenience of taking out their smartphones when on the move in a commuter train or when whiling away time at the dentist’s office, rather than take time out to sit in front of a desk, wait for the laptop to boot, and get connected.

Many e-commerce players, quick to spot the trends, have come up with responsive mobile websites and rolled out native mobile apps, to facilitate the mobile-savvy customer. In fact e-tailers no longer have a choice; as 57% of customers won’t even recommend businesses with poor mobile sites, leave alone patronize it. However, most of the early adopters have also discovered merely launching mobile apps or mobile websites is not enough. It is still a fiercely competitive marketplace, and only those who go all out to facilitate the mobile customer wins.

Here are some ways to go all-out, to pamper the highly fickle mobile shopper

Leverage the Power of Simplicity.

The mobile is a consumption-focused device. Play to this strength by making it easy for the user to find what they are looking to consume. Leverage the power of simplicity through a minimalist design and a clean structure. The best apps do not require too much keyboarding or taping on menus, and makes all crucial process, be it registration, login, ordering, check-out, and payment fast and easy. Simplicity and minimalism offers a residual benefit of minimizing data traffic, and speeding up page-loads, which in turns boosts SEO.

Think like a Mobile Customer

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

The path and trajectory of desktop and mobile user are diametrically different. Successful e-tailers understand the customer’s journey and design the mobile experience around it, delivering a good UX. For instance, since most mobile users shop when on the move, or in the midst of doing something else, anything that shortens interaction time boosts the chances of conversion. Also, since mobile users generally prefer browsing different products, and as such, navigate different screens before actually making a purchase, making it easy to browse many products, add items to the cart, and check out later increases the chances of conversion and making long-term fans. Successful e-tailers also leverage analytics to personalize for the customer, taking into consideration the extremely personal nature of mobile devices.

Leverage the Power of Innovation

 The overriding focus of successful e-tailers is how to uniquely serve their mobile customers. They strive to make their mobile assets dynamic, through promos, deals, offers, discounts, and more. In this, they innovate to ensure their apps leverage the latest developments in technology, or to ride the latest smartphone trends. The best m-commerce apps leverage the unique capability of mobile devices, such as geo-targeting, location-based services, QR codes, and more, to deliver customized offers and deals, and other value-added services.

Integrate Mobile with Overall e-Commerce Strategy

A mobile friendly website or a native app may induce the customer to make a purchase immediately. However, for all the efforts put in by the e-tailer, there is always a possibility of sheer hardware limitations driving poor mobile experience. As such, it is important to integrate the mobile strategy with the overall e-commerce strategy, and provide a consistent experience across channels, where a customer may “capture” of the purchase on mobile and complete the transaction on a larger screen. This is even more important as 53% of customers look at products in brick and mortar store and buy online.

Tie in m-Commerce with Social Media

Mobile and social media are almost inseparable. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the likes are on the screens of nearly everyone stuck on the subway, bus, or train. Successful e-tailers who integrate their m-commerce strategy with their social efforts are able to draw in quite a number of social media visitors straight to the m-commerce site.

There is however, no one-size-fits-all solution. The best way to milk the ongoing m-commerce revolution depends on your specific business. Partnering with us to expand and enhance your mobile strategy allows you to leverage our wide experience and expertise, and is a guaranteed way to save time and improve your ROI.

There are components in business that ride the wave of time to have halo’s associated with it, when space, time and the event coincide, the companies that wear the halo accelerates its reach and hits the bull’s-eye. The resulting amalgamation of people, processes and ideas have time and time again celebrated success. This has been etched in stone, but what’s more contrasting and less surprising is that the components that create the halo is never the same and are subjected to disruption from around. There were innovations that elevated organizations and disruptions that have catapulted few others to the top. Particularly, the digital forces that once was touted as a disruption, which is now increasingly becoming the norm for the future.

The Whole Picture

Digital Transformation is not about islands of digitization like digital marketing, digital customer behavior or transformation from paper to digital media within an organization, rather it is a demanding process that requires considerable time, holistic thought and skilled people to guide the transformation process. The change has to be ideally driven from top-down, where the business leaders can put together the pieces of the digital puzzle thus enabling a rapid transformation in the business processes, activities and work models to move faster and efficiently to meet customer and business needs. This transformation of business by leveraging technology ultimately rests on the people who can drive the change into all layers of the organization.

Common Frontiers, Different Approach

Digital as the way forward is being experimented at varying degrees and varying pace by organizations. Some become more successful than the other to make this change a holistic one that touches the entire organization. The successful organizations show traits of digital maturity that touch different areas within an enterprise like Marketing, Operations, HR and Customer service; business models that unite these areas, and processes that embed efficiency through business automation, optimization, and management.
The foundation of successful transformation into the digital realm lies in organizational change, this change needs to address some key areas:

• For existing business, there is a need to take stock and understand why to transform, what to transform and how to transform. Once the reflection is carried out and you have figured out the answers to these questions, you should ideally start your mission to a digitally modified business. Improving on digital lines can help to have improved decision making by the use of big data, analytics, creating an effective corporate control, Risk optimization by automating manual labor, improved targeting with insights from customers, augmentation of traditional channels into digital and whenever wherever service propositions as well. Granted your journey would require much change from the status quo, and even you may not be as digital as a “Born Digital” company, but effective action can leverage the existing business, giving better reach to help multinational companies to truly have global operations.

•  For an organization, Digital transformation process is multifaceted. Right from the beginning, it is essential that the organization has leaders with the potential to drive this change. The company has to make changes in their best practices in business architecture, BPM, continuous improvement, continuous innovation, crowd computing etc. Latest tools for robotics and sensors that can automate much of the mundane, so that the organization can focus on building lasting relationships with the customer. A mix of digital technologies, tools, and best practices can set the stage for Digital Transformation.

• The end part of the digital transformation is the customer experience. The models, the processes and the coherence of the activities carried out within an organization should ideally drive the customer journey with an emphasis on the physical and digital touch points. With Digital it is possible to effectively map this journey by understanding the way the customer interacts with business and brands, this invariably helps to find the best-fit solution for the customers. This is made possible through the combination of software, IoT, Big data, Mobile, CRM, Augments reality etc. In reality, a company may not be able to perform all these alone, it would have to seek partners that can run part of the show for them so that the companies can, in turn, focus on building their main offering.

The final touch points, like the interface, should invariably help the customer feel at ease and add touches of modernity. Looks aren’t everything, but when you and your competitor have the same product, looks, and a streamlined interface would come in handy

The Digital Wave doesn’t mean to throw away the method in which the business is being currently being conducted, rather it should dovetail and leverage the current best practices. When this is executed in the right way, the businesses can cater to a wider array of customers, speed to hit break even in shorter time, improve workflow employee efficiency within the organization. All companies irrespective of the segments they cater must invest proportionally so that risks can be mitigated and key opportunities are addressed in the most prudent way.

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.

That the cloud is the backbone of this IoT revolution goes without saying. Reports from the January 2016 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) reveal most manufacturers equipping their devices, be it refrigerators, cars, dishwashers, running shoes, thermostats, and every other conceivable device massive cloud-based back end, to enable such devices to join the IoT bandwagon. The investment in cloud capabilities comes from the twin need to enable these devices to become “smart” by receiving and transmitting data, and to give these devices long-term value by making them instantly upgradable. The cloud facilitates both these IoT objectives.

For IoT to work, the connected device needs to communicate with other “things” and also with whoever holds the control strings. The “thing” connects with cloud servers to receive and transmit data, and store instructions and commands.  At another pane, the “small” data from each connected yet disparate “thing” accumulate and become big data in the cloud. The convergence of huge quantities of critical data in a common cloud pane, accessible anytime and anywhere, enables real-time analytics.

The possibilities of such cloud powered real-time analytics to make life better, and for businesses to unlock new opportunities are endless. A few cases in point:

• Traffic controllers can source in small data from hundreds of IoT-enabled traffic signals, and subject it to real time big data analytics in the cloud, to ensure synchronized operation of traffic lights, and deliver seamless movement of traffic.
• Smart sensors attached to a pair of running shoes may clock the runner’s pace and notify them when it is time to replace the shoes. Small data from millions of such shoes would allow shoe manufacturers to predict demand accurately, and target prospects with precision.
• IoT-powered refrigerators can let the homeowner know when food products are reaching their expiration date, or when the stock is running out. It may also transmit data to the supermarket, who can then predict demand accurately, and get their inventory right. In fact, the refrigerator may send off a replenishment order to the supermarket automatically.

Millions of sensors embedded on things already monitor and track data of all hues, and deeper insights from the analysis of such big data facilitate better-informed decisions and responses, cutting across industries and sectors.

But is the cloud really necessary for all this? Can IoT make itself useful without the cloud?

The IoT ecosystem that enables the possibilities would not be possible without back-end cloud-based applications that churn, translate and transmit valuable intelligence.

With terabytes of data flowing in from millions of disparate connected “things,” the cloud is the only viable platform that can filter, store, and enable access of the required information, in useful ways.

The amount of incoming data from connected devices sensors often fluctuates widely. A sensor may generate 1000 KB of data in a day, 4TB on another day, and may not generate any data at all on a Sunday. The elasticity of the cloud enables scaling up or scaling down resources to absorb such wide fluctuations of data.

Hybrid cloud systems facilitate IoT-enabled services to communicate with  geographically distributed back-end systems. This anytime anywhere connectivity is indispensable for real-time analytics, and to enable path-breaking business models and public services.

The cloud back-end does away with the near-impossible alternative of regularly updating thousands of individual “things.” Updates are a part and parcel of any system’s life, and is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

The built-in security of the cloud assures that data is protected and compliance standards are baked into the platform.

For all the enablers of the cloud, security remained a drawback. For instance, IoT enabled driverless cars, with cloud servers providing navigation instructions to car, but what if someone hacked into the public cloud server and send the passengers to Kingdom Come! Newer purpose-built clouds that device developers may share or use exclusively offers viable solutions to such security risks, combined with newer tools that protect from information leakage and iron out the few remaining chinks in the cloud armor.

The cloud and IoT being an inseparable couple cuts both ways. Even as the IoT requires the cloud to work, the cloud is evolving to better serve IoT. In fact, IoT is now a chief focus of the cloud.

As the number of connected devices increases exponentially, cloud infrastructure is on the threshold of  a massive scale up, to accommodate the data swell. Unique, custom build hybrid cloud deployment models, leveraging the latest advances in software and networking, designed to meet the needs of customers’ unique workloads, enable IoT players to maximize the potential the cloud offers, without being hassled by availability, performance and security issues. Side by side specialized cloud-based service software, systems and skill development is in a boom phase, as is bandwidth improvements to facilitate transmission of data between “things” and the cloud.

A case in point, Microsoft’s recently launched Azure Functions, a “server-less compute,” allowing developers to create apps that automatically respond to events is one such path-breaking service  launched recently. Microsoft’s Azure Service Fabric platform-as-a-service (PaaS) platform makes it possible to decompose applications into microservices, for increased availability and scalability.

The IoT revolution is well underway, but as things stand, only the tip of the IoT iceberg has been touched, with just 0.06% of things that could be potentially connected to the Internet being currently connected. However, growth is exponential, with 328 million new “things” being connected to the IoT ecosystem every month. The cloud infrastructure is gearing up simultaneously, to enable a whole new world of cloud powered  IoT.

Fingent delivers technologies to enable your IoT solutions— cloud, networks and gateways, heterogeneous device support, systems capabilities, and data analytics. We provide industry-specific solutions that improve productivity and operational efficiency, with exceptional reliability and security. Learn about Fingent’s IoT System