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Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

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Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

ForewordMobile applications are now widely regarded as the key to true enterprise mobility success, overtaking the initial wave of BYOD and gaining significant investment from mobile enterprises over the last year or so. However, there are still mixed views on how best to develop enterprise mobile applications, with a vast amount of fluctuation towards selection of strategies, methods for development, preferences for deployment and attaining levels of adoption.

This report will analyse how the enterprise mobile app landscape has evolved over the last year, what approaches can provide the most value, and where mobility leaders see the market heading in the next 12-18 months.

About the Author

This Enterprise Mobility Exchange Market Report has been written in collaboration with Jeff Wallace, an Advisory Board member of Enterprise Mobility Exchange and founder & president of Global Kinetics Inc., a corporate advisor and market development accelerator partner to early-to-mid stage clients seeking to establish or expand operations within the U.S. marketplace.

Wallace was previously with Cognizant Technology Solutions and Brillio, where he served as the founder of and Global Practice Head for the Mobility practices. There he also focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and user experience (UX) practice areas. In addition, Wallace is an advisor to several Bay Area/Silicon Valley technology

accelerators where he advises several early to mid stage technology companies. He also frequently speaks at international conferences and corporate events and has published numerous documents about enterprise mobility, user experience, Internet of Things and related topics.

ContentsPAGE 3-4 How Has the Mobile App Landscape Evolved Over the Past Year? • User Experience Trumps Functionality • A Focus on Cross-Platform Deployment • The Growth of the Internet of Things • What About Security?

PAGE 5 How to Gain the Most Value From Your Mobile Apps

PAGE 6 Where is the Mobile App Landscape Heading in the Next 12-18 Months? • Top Tips to Leverage the Upcoming Opportunities Within Mobile Apps PAGE 7 Sponsors Spotlight

PAGE 8 About Enterprise Mobility Exchange

PAGE 8 2016 Market Report Offering

Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

How Has the Mobile App Landscape Evolved Over the Past Year?When looking at the evolution of the mobile app landscape in the past year there are three key trends that have made a big impact. They are not strictly limited to the last 12 months, but they have sharpened and become more important during this time. They are: user experience (UX), cross-platform development and the Internet of Things (IoT).

User Experience Trumps FunctionalitySpecific to the enterprise mobile landscape, good enough is no longer good enough. With enterprise apps in particular, it used to be that people focused on functionality within the app and weren’t so worried about making it ‘pretty’. However, the lines between consumer and enterprise apps have blurred and the experience we receive from an enterprise app today has to be almost equal, if not definitely equal, to the experience we receive from some of our favourite consumer apps. As such, user experience has become far more paramount to enterprises developing mobile solutions today.

Drawing from his experience as the CIO of Consulate Health Care, Mark Crandall explained: “Consumer applications that ease workflow in our everyday lives are becoming more and more prevalent. People expect a mobile application to make their lives easier, whether that is keeping track of daily tasks, keeping in touch with friends, or planning a week’s worth of meals to cook at home for the family. Enterprise users feel that they have every right to be just as demanding on their enterprise apps, and why shouldn’t they?”

However, providing a great user experience requires a different skill set. While mobile developers are able to write the code, someone else, someone who understands the overall UX, personas, user journeys, and app ‘ergonomics’, needs to be involved to create the compelling user experience that will engage people to use the app.

A mantra we like, as it relates to this topic, is as follows: ‘user experience drives user adoption, and user adoption drives ROI’. We don’t know of any enterprise that doesn’t have expectations for earning a return on their mobility investments. Following the simple logic of the mantra, the way to earn such a return is to have users adopt the applications developed. And there’s really only one way to get user adoption – create something compelling enough that users actually want to adopt and use the app.

In fact, for new applications being developed today, user experience is even more important than functionality, for the experience is what drives user adoption, and again, user adoption drives return on investment. The recommendation is to create apps that have limited functionality but that offer an awesome experience. Then, and only then, whatever is added into version two and beyond will be downloaded and, if the high quality experience continues to be emphasised, will be used and enjoyed.

To achieve this, you need to have a sharp, laser-focus on UX before even one letter of code is written. You have to ask yourself: how do I want my users to feel when they are using my app? Start from there and focus on what you want them to experience and how you want them to use the app. To prove this, just ask a few colleagues what their favourite app is and you’ll almost surely notice them smiling when they reply. They do so subconsciously when thinking about how their favourite app makes them feel. So, your mandate when developing mobile apps and solutions is to figure out how to get a smile when users think about your app. That is how important UX is and why that key focus needs to be there.

Remember, functionality is a given, the app must do something in terms of function. However, it can be done poorly or it can be done amazingly. And if you do it amazingly a lot more people will use your app, and we know what follows on from adoption.

A Focus on Cross-Platform DeploymentWe have heard quite a bit about cross-platform development for a while but it is even more important today as the world moves more toward BYOD policies. The question specifically relating to cross-platform that emerges is: how do we achieve a high quality user experience across multiple platforms and do so resource and cost efficiently? Remember, it is not just iOS and Android, for outside of North America the Windows phone is a viable platform and one which we think will gain more penetration in the global market place, particularly within the enterprise. There is not one enterprise executive within technology that isn’t already comfortable with Microsoft. But, the very same cannot be as easily said about Apple and Google.

The real question for providing a quality cross-platform experience is: how do you do this time efficiently and cost efficiently? We’ve yet to meet a CEO or CTO whose biggest problem is that they have too much money and too much time and they just don’t know what to do with it all. So, what do you do in a budget and time constrained world to accomplish high quality UX for end users (be it employees, consumers and/or partners) on all mobile platforms? There is not an easy answer.

Specific to the enterprise mobile landscape, good enough is no longer good enough.

User experience drives user adoption, and user adoption drives ROI.

Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

The main thing you need to do is make a choice. There are a lot of vendors in the market that claim to be able to help you with this cross-platform challenge. And there’s a lot of marketplace volatility; new vendors, new form factors, new upgrades, new operating systems. All this volatility causes enterprises to sit on the side lines and wait, presumably for the dust to settle. No one wants to make decisions today, for the fear that in the next week, month or quarter something new comes out that makes the decision look foolish.

There is a low risk tolerance level in the marketplace and rather than making a choice about which technology to use, enterprises simply pilot many things, so that they are never really risking that much and can let higher management know that things are moving forward in the right direction. Even now, in the 8th year of the ‘smart mobility era’ (inaugurated with the birth of the iPhone); they are still stuck in pilot mode.

But the dust is not going to settle any time soon. So, a big recommendation is to stop waiting for this; make a choice, and live with it. There are ways to future-proof and make sure the choice is not career limiting, but you have to get past the pilot mode mentality and focus on delivering robust mobile solutions. Pilot at least one or two vendors, do a bake-off and then go full steam ahead with whichever one wins.

And be sure to obtain a well-structured, risk mitigating SLA (service level agreement) from your chosen solution provider. This will give you the needed security in this volatile realm of mobile technology solutions. When new OSs, devices, form factors, etc. are unleashed into the market, your provider will offer support within a stated, reasonable timeframe.

The Growth of the Internet of Things

The third thing happening in the enterprise is the emergence of the Internet of Things. So, why is this topic a major trend in the enterprise mobility landscape? We would put mobility as a subset to the broader category of IoT. After all, mobile devices are merely just connected things and that is, quite literally, what IoT is. The evolution of this over the past year has been very powerful and people are starting to realise that mobility is now more viewed in the context of the broader framework of IoT rather than being the broad framework itself.

As a simplistic example, if an enterprise owns vending machines, drivers used to manually check which ones were low on inventory and needed to be restocked. Now these connected devices can speak to the distribution centres themselves and drivers will only have to go to the machines that are calling out for restocking. That is the integration of mobile apps into the broader IoT context.

When thinking about enterprise mobility and all that can be done to improve operational efficiency or add new, innovative revenue streams, understand that IoT can enable far more opportunities than merely mobile devices themselves. Sensors, beacons, GPS, digital signage, and other related IoT technologies, all factor into the conversation today about enterprise mobility applications.

Again, a simple example demonstrates this point. Imagine a customer entering a retail environment and upon being ‘sensed’, has a coupon triggered to their mobile phone to encourage spontaneous purchases. Moreover, this could be pinpoint focused within just one store aisle by way of shelf beacons combined with in-store GPS. Even more, digital signage could change based on the number of customers looking at it, the purchase profile history of a nearby customer, or other ‘triggers’, all of which extend the mobility solutions far beyond just the handset/tablet device.

When it comes to IoT, there is a whole new world of machine-to-machine and machine-to-human opportunities that can be created. In fact, the only real limitation is one’s imagination. This is unlikely to get less important over time, but rather only more and more important across many industries.

What About Security?While we haven’t touched upon security as one of the key trends in the enterprise mobility application landscape of the past 12 months, you have to, of course, be focusing on this; nobody wants to be the next headline when it comes to a data breach. You must realise that as we extend mobility further into the workplace, we are putting a susceptible breach point in the hands of every employee; if it has an IP address, it is hackable.

So, be sure to maintain a sharp focus on those security offerings that provide the best approaches to securing your network, data and devices. Deploy best of breed mobile application management (MAM), mobile device management (MDM), secure containerised solutions, and more to ensure that each element within your overall mobile solution is individually and comprehensively minimising the risk of a breach. Security is a big thing and will always be part of the ongoing conversation as to what is important in enterprise mobile environments.

Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc., added: “Improved security and threat detection and going to be major factors that drive mobility trends. Securing devices and data while proactively detecting threats are key success factors.”

When it comes to IoT, there is a whole new world of machine-to-machine and machine-to-human opportunities that can be created.

Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

How to Gain the Most Value From Your Mobile Apps To get the most value from your mobile applications, and tying closely to the trends currently dominating the enterprise mobility market, you must initially focus on small functionality with a high-quality user experience. Emphasise UX right from the beginning – with tools such as personas, user journeys and other design developments – which will lead to a much more efficient and cost-effective outcome.

In addition to focusing on the user experience, it is also imperative to constantly communicate with your end-users to understand what that ideal experience looks like to them. “For internal development, I cannot stress enough how important it is to have iterative sessions with your users,” Mark Crandall explained.

He continued: “It is no longer acceptable from a time or budget-risk standpoint to take some requirements, go away and code for three months, and come back and present a deliverable to your business stakeholders. Consistent engagement with the stakeholders is a must and the sooner they can touch and use apps via mock-ups, the better they will appreciate the finished product.”

On top of a focus on UX there should be an emphasis on cross-platform development. For example, even if you want to only build an iOS app, rather than doing so in a native iOS fashion, you should utilise a cross-platform development tool. Using this tool you could still only deploy iOS; however, when

you later are ready to deploy an Android or Windows app as well, you will already be approximately 60-80 per cent done.

Using cross-platform tools, even if you only need one platform for now, is a very solid insurance policy should you later come to need a second or third platform – and you won’t then be stuck in an inefficient path, developing multiple native apps in the device providers’ respective software development kits, using different teams and sucking up vast amounts of resources to accomplish this objective.

Additionally, if you use native iOS or native Android and a new platform emerges, you will be forced to set up a new team and a new app specifically for that platform. However, if you use a reputable and stable cross-platform provider, they will give you an SLA, such that if a new operating system or device comes out they will provide support for this within a set amount of time.

It is an insurance policy within an unstable market, because an IT department today cannot keep up with the frenetic pace of change. It is just too risky for any IT department to want to take this on along. So, you should share the risk and give this responsibility to a third party partner, which protects you with an SLA.

Finally, Mark Bowker said: “Any mobile app approach should be matched tightly to an improved process. Mobility changes employee behaviour and it is important that this behavioural change is targeted and creating an improved experience and productivity.”

“Consistent engagement with the stakeholders is a must and the sooner they can touch and use apps via mock-ups, the better they will appreciate the finished product.”

Mark Crandall, CIO of Consulate Health Care

“Any mobile app approach should be matched tightly to an improved process.”

Mark Bowker, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, Inc.

Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

Where is the Mobile App Landscape Heading in the Next 12-18 Months?As previously mentioned, consumer experience is affecting enterprise experiences and this will continue to be a trend in the next 12-18 months. “The consumer world is leading the mobile charge,” Tim Hundt, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Element Financial Corporation, said.

He explained that this trend will continue yielding expectations of a great user experience, constant availability (no outages or scheduled downtime), leveraging device capabilities (i.e. sensors, etc.), adaption to adapt to context (i.e. location, time, traveling in a vehicle, etc.) and a focus on meeting users’ needs.

“Think how Google Now takes schedule, traffic, etc. into account and adapts to assist the user,” Hundt concluded.

Additionally, while most enterprises today are heavily focused on a two operating system environment – iOS and Android – in the next 18 months Microsoft will rear its head as a much more aggressive competitor within the enterprise. The cross-platform element highlighted previously will become even more paramount, because we will likely see the emergence of a strong third platform. Now that Microsoft has Windows 10, which is also a very robust mobile operating system, it changes the landscape.

Furthermore, Samsung is aggressively trying to create Tizen. The next 12-18 months will give us a good window into determining if Samsung can create a fourth (or fifth, if we count BlackBerry) major mobile operating system. And we will be able to see whether these two deep-pocketed and mobile-entrenched players – Microsoft and Samsung – can make a strong effort to attack the duopoly of Apple and Google.

Over this time period, IoT will also become enormous and mobility will be subsumed by IoT as the topic of conversation. I don’t see anything completely disruptive within this landscape that we haven’t already seen the emergence of, however virtual reality from a mobile perspective (think Oculus and HoloLens) will gain some enterprise traction.

As will mobile payments, where we will see some groups emerge ahead of the pack in the next 18 months.

From a telemedicine perspective, Mark Crandall said that in 2016 “mobile will be a game changer”. He explained: “I truly believe, as consumers become more comfortable with having a video visit with their physician through a mobile device in 2016, mobile will be a game changer in most markets including long-term care. Opportunities in telemedicine will be able to save our patients un-necessary return trips to the hospital and keep our patients comfortable while they are in our care centres.”

Top Tips to Leverage the Upcoming Opportunities Within Mobile AppsHaving spoken about what the shape of the mobile app landscape is today and where the market is heading in the next 12-18 months, we have four final top tips to help you leverage the upcoming opportunities to their fullest extent.

1. Get comfortable with risk and don’t wait for the dust to settle. This goes back to what we’ve previously discussed about enterprises getting stuck in pilot mode. To move ahead, pilot at least one or two vendors, do a bake-off and then go full steam ahead with the winner.

2. Mark Crandall pointed out that it’s important to be an advocate for your end-users when it comes to mobile app development. He explained: “For trusted software development partners that we maintain Software as a Service (SaaS) relationships with, it is crucial to be a vocal member of a Customer Advisory Board, if they have one. This venue is key to making sure that the companies developing software solutions for our practitioners understand our specific needs as well as the needs of the market in general. If you don’t speak up and advocate for your practitioners, it is less likely that a service will be useful. Think about workflow – if it doesn’t help, adoption of a mobile application won’t even get off the ground.”

3. Mark Bowker, said: “Involve business executives that have a significant population of mobile works or employees that use different device types for the role. Use the change in behaviour to initiate success while improving IT control and security.”

4. Last but not least, Tim Hundt highlighted the importance of looking at what other companies both within and outside the field are doing. He said: “See what the progressive companies in the consumer space are doing and follow their example: focus on user needs and leverage all of the capabilities of the devices to meet those needs.”

“The consumer world is leading the mobile charge.” Tim Hundt, Head of Enterprise Architecture at Element Financial Corporation

Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

Sponsors Spotlight

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Mobile Applications: What’s Next for Enterprises?

February 2016 Market Report

About Enterprise Mobility Exchange

2016 Market Report Offering

Enterprise Mobility Exchange is an online community for global mobility professionals and business leaders who are leveraging mobile technology and services to improve operational efficiency, increase customer acquisition and loyalty, and drive increased profits across the entire enterprise.

At Enterprise Mobility Exchange we’re dedicated to providing members with an exclusive learning environment where you can share ideas, best practice and solutions for your greatest mobility challenges.

You will receive expert commentary, tools and resources developed by experienced mobility professionals and industry insiders. With a growing membership and global portfolio of invitation-only bespoke meetings, Enterprise Mobility Exchange ensures you keep your finger on the pulse by delivering practical and strategic advice to help you achieve your business goals.

January:Wearable Devices – Enterprise Expectations and Initiatives

February: Mobile Applications – What’s Next for Businesses?

March:Big Data and Analytics

April:Overcoming the Top 5 Barriers to Becoming a Mobile-First Enterprise

May:Keeping Up in a Connected World – The Future of M2M in the Enterprise

June: Exploring the Mobile Enterprise – 5 Exclusive EME Case Studies

July:Field Services – Finding New Value From Mobile Technology

August:Mobile Security – Solving the Number One Challenge With Mobility

September: Top 5 Mobility Mistakes – Lessons Learned for Future Success

October:Wi-Fi Infrastructure and Connectivity

November: Engaging Customers With Mobility – Innovation through Communication

December:Looking Ahead to 2017 – The EME Analyst Insight Report

For more information regarding these reports, email EMEsponsorship@iqpc.com

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