Along with social networking, mobile has revolutionized and become an integral part of the consumer digital experience. There are hundreds of thousands of apps available for iOS, not even taking into account Android and other mobile operating systems, and users download billions of apps each year.
People use mobile devices to communicate with friends, take and share photos and videos, play games, book flights, and manage their bank accounts — and that’s just a tiny fraction of the uses. With that level of ubiquity in the consumer space, it’s no surprise that people have come to expect the same functionality when they go to work. Businesses that put well-designed mobile solutions in place can increase efficiency and productivity.
The best path to success when considering and implementing an enterprise mobile solution is to start with a specific need and work backward. Look for specific use cases that are crying out for a mobile solution. Sales teams are often a good place to start, because they’re constantly in the field. A mobile app could, for example, improve their responsiveness to customers by pushing out the most recent sales materials, or alerting them to new product lines or price changes.
Just as with consumer apps, mobile enterprise tools start with the design constraint of the small screen and touch interface of whatever mobile device or devices will be used. That constraint means good mobile apps don’t try to do 50 different things. Rather, they do a very small number of things really well. That’s one reason there are so many apps available. The “appification” of public-facing websites meant taking sites that were crammed with content and layers of menus and forms and boiling them down to their essential purpose for the small screen. Sometimes that means breaking up one massive site into mobile components that serve very specific purposes. The same goes for enterprise mobile.
Don’t fall into the trap of trying to replicate an entire enterprise collaboration platform for a mobile device. People aren’t going to sit down and write entire proposals on an iPad, so find ways where mobile will be truly useful. Say a company has discovered that there’s a bottleneck in the workflow of producing whitepapers because they have to be approved by managers who are often out of the office. An app could solve this problem by giving them a way to review and approve documents while on the go. The app shouldn’t make the managers tap through multiple screens and cross reference emails just to make that decision. If all the information is presented in one place, they can easily review it and decide whether to approve a document or send it back for revisions, eliminating the bottleneck in the workflow and improving productivity.
Smartphones now have a lot of built-in capabilities that can have interesting business uses, including — but not limited to — accelerometers, fingerprint scanners and GPS chips. Or consider the humble camera. A construction company that has a workflow involving taking and filing pictures of completed projects could create a way to complete a SharePoint form from a mobile device, so workers could take the photo and file it in the workflow from the field instead of having to go to a computer.
There are clearly some great opportunities to improve the enterprise, but mobile design is challenging, and custom app development, while sometimes worthwhile, is also expensive. One solution for companies that don’t want to go down that road is to consider cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, such as Office 365. Office 365 has mobile ready out-of-the-box, and the company can let the vendor worry about optimizing the interface for small screens and making sure the product is compatible with a variety of platforms.
When implementing mobile tools, the main challenge is providing a consistent user experience across all of the devices and operating systems used by employees. While some mobile functionality is quite straightforward, such as accessing and using work email from a smartphone, companies need to bring mobile to all the other collaborative tasks, such as accessing content and communicating with colleagues in ways that are more effective than sending an email.
Another obstacle to implementing this technology is being able to prioritize other use cases for mobile in your organization. While it might seem like a good idea to open up all of your systems for mobile access, that’s likely to introduce a whole new set of issues and security concerns. With your legacy systems, various security measures have been developed and introduced over time. If you suddenly throw open the doors to mobile access, you won’t have a secure environment for collaboration.
That’s why it’s important to prioritize the aspects of your infrastructure that you want to take mobile, and take steps to ensure that any new content or sites the company develops start with a mobile-first perspective, assuming that people will access that site via phone or tablet.
For both small and large organizations, the most common approach to mobile is to adapt to the realities of a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment. Many companies use third-party solutions that help enable BYOD and make these devices more secure from a software perspective. In most situations, trying to control what devices employees use turns out to be neither realistic nor worth the time.
A great way to begin implementing mobile-first design is to start fresh with a new initiative or solution upgrade and learn as you go, rather than trying to revamp a complex existing project.
Also, make sure to start with projects that are ideal for mobile. Prioritize the use cases that make the most sense and stand to offer the best return. You probably don’t need to start implementing mobile by enabling mobile applications for internal finance reports, for example. But your sales force may already have specific needs that could be addressed by mobile technology, with a significant impact for the company.
Your five best tips for mobile:
- Take an inventory of what devices your employees already use. This helps you determine which types of mobile solutions to implement first.
- Survey users to understand priority use cases. Find out how users want to use mobile devices for work and if they have specific needs that must be met.
- Select a new initiative from the priority use cases and apply a “mobile-first” design approach.
- Initiate a pilot program. Make sure to provide feedback mechanisms for users and observe them in the field, taking note of user behaviors and workarounds.
- Use findings from the pilot program to build momentum for the broader rollout. Talk internally about what you’ve discovered, and look for other groups in the company that could also apply to these mobile solutions.
Learn more about getting the most out of today’s enterprise technology tools by downloading our free e-book, “7 Keys To Mastering The Digital Workplace.”
