I recently had the pleasure of speaking at the CTO Forum’s “RETHINK TECHNOLOGY: Transforming IT Systems, Data and Technology Operations”. It was a great conference with more than 100 CTO/CIO’s in attendance.
There was a lot of discussion and questions about enterprise mobility at the conference. I’ll talk about the first question here. In upcoming blog posts, I’ll review two additional topics that came up in my conversations with clients, prospects, and industry experts. Here the first:
Is enterprise application mobility a passing fad or is it inevitable?
Obviously, you’d expect PowWow Mobile to vote for inevitability. But the universality of responses surprised me; there was no one at the conference who saw the desktop/laptop as the enterprise application platform of the future. However, there were many examples of mobile leading the way toward increased productivity and modernization. Here are two scenarios that came up multiple times in discussions:
Mobility = Productivity = Modernization = Profitability
Consider appliance repair workers on site. Their top challenge is familiarity with a customer’s particular appliance. Often they have a laptop with help manuals loaded onto the drive. Or they call the help line. And wait, perhaps they get an answer, perhaps they have to take photos, head back to the office and come back another day. With a mobile solution—tablet or phone—they could access their knowledge systems, run testing programs and take pictures of the problems they encounter. No missed calls, no interminable waits, no trips back to the home office to show a more senior engineer the pictures. The customer is not only happy but the process is more productive and has been modernized. And when you’re running a repair organization of 5000 workers, those efficiencies add up quickly and in a way that makes Finance sit up and take notice.
Mobility = Productivity = Customer Acquisition
Current financial advisors interview prospective clients with paper and pencil. Then they return to the office, where admins input the answers into powerful proposal generation apps to generate paper proposals. But consider a scenario where the financial advisor conducts the interview on a mobile device that’s always connected, like an iPad. Now the financial advisor generates a proposal on the spot. Not only is the client impressed by the immediacy and accuracy, but the back-end administrative costs are reduced or eliminated.
In coming blog posts I’ll discuss the other two major topics that emerged from the conference: the importance of the user experience in enterprise mobilization and the need for scalable solutions in light of the number of applications that most enterprises need to mobilize.
