The uptake of today’s enterprise mobility is largely driven by employees. They have brought their consumer devices such as their iPhones to the enterprise and are increasingly demanding the same mobile experiences from their employer. The wide use of touch screens and devices such as the iPad will only accelerate this longing for easy to use mobile apps in the near future.
So far the focus of enterprises regarding mobility has been on mobile infrastructure (devices, connectivity, security), mobile office (email, agenda, scheduling) and some b2c players on fragmented mobile marketing initiatives (branding, advertising, promotion).
Increasingly enterprises start to have an eye for mobile apps that are more process and strategy focused. Examples are mobile apps for field sales, field services, logistics, mobile CRM and mobile customer service.
Enterprises turn to Service2Media with questions such as:
- What are the enterprise applications most suitable to extend with mobile apps?
- What kind of value add can mobile apps provide for shortcomings and limitations in the existing enterprise applications portfolio, providing value in term of cost efficiency, client satisfaction or competitive advantage?
- What kind of mobile apps that we have difficulty to envision today can we implement tomorrow, such as enterprise location-based-services for employees and assets, or mobile enterprise media (Shell Mobile Media Channel)?
- On what kind of outward and inward facing enterprise processes should we focus and which processes are in particular time and location sensitive? For example are sales people a good target audience for mobile apps as they are often plagued by extensive time-waste, waiting for meeting or airplanes?
- Should we approach mobile apps as vertical point solutions provided by packaged app vendors or system integrators, or as a well-orchestrated mobile app portfolio provided by mobile app experts that operate horizontal on top of the existing enterprise application architecture? What are the pros and cons of both approaches?
- How can we best maintain a horizontal mobile apps portfolio in a standardized fashion? Which vendors can support us with this horizontal mobile apps portfolio and help us distribute the apps through customized enterprise app stores?