Mobile devices have become the centrepiece of our work and personal lives. Add cloud-enabled social tools and predictive analytics and you have a business environment that is always on the move. This new IT landscape is profoundly changing the way companies relate to their customers, interact with employees, and bring products and services to market. Enterprise mobility is not only a pathway to convenience and efficiency in this new world of work, but also a key driver of business innovation.
Enterprise mobility isn’t just another IT project; nor is it about a single app or mobile web site. The most successful enterprise mobility strategies are built on a strong collaboration between business and IT. This approach allows the business the freedom to innovate while providing IT the control to do it securely.
Mobility is one important component of a new master IT architecture—social, mobile, analytics and cloud (the SMAC stack)—that is emerging to help organisations shift from old-world industrial models to more digitally powered ways of working. Mobility is providing reach, ubiquitous connectivity and new ways of interacting with employees, partners, customers, consumers and prospects. Innovative mobile solutions can radically increase convenience and productivity for various constituencies and provide them with a superior experience.
Today, mobility is about using smart devices and tablets to spur technological innovations that power disruptive change. Competitive advantage is being achieved by companies that leverage enterprise mobility to create viable new business models.
At the first level of enterprise mobility, or Mobility 1.0, companies seek to mobile-enable or mobile-optimise their Web sites, existing Web apps and digital assets to increase productivity for employees and customers. The challenge is to keep ahead of the proliferation and constant state of flux within smart devices, development platforms and mobile operating systems.
With Mobility 2.0, organisations typically look to transform business processes via mobility. For example, expense account reporting has always been a cumbersome process for employees, requiring them to save paper receipts, fill out forms and then send everything to corporate accounts payable for payment. By contrast, a mobile-enabled expense-submitting process is much quicker and easier. Employees need to only take pictures of their receipts with their smart device, categorise them with a simple pull-down menu, and click a “submit” button to send them to accounting for reimbursement.
To be sure, at this early stage of the smart mobility era, most companies are still at mobility levels 1.0 and 2.0. Few have yet ventured into the Mobility 3.0 territory, in which organisations leverage mobile technology to create entirely new business models and revenue streams. In Mobility 3.0, both B2B and B2C companies have greater opportunities to reach their target markets directly to improve profitability or add new customers. Mobile payments on feature phones, as well as smartphones, are enabling access to whole new continents of consumers.
Therefore enterprise mobility is no longer an option, but rather a critical business requirement. Winning the future will require companies across industries to embrace mobility platforms that unlock productivity and competitive advantage and optimise ongoing process changes that span the core operating model.
The use of mobile computing in business today goes far beyond e-mail access, messaging services and horizontal applications. The ecosystem now includes access to core enterprise applications, both services and data. Today’s computationally powerful and smart devices with high-resolution screens allow employees to query, access and view business data in an engaging format in real-time, even when they are off-premises. Similarly, operational and field workforces now have the ability to capture and share corporate data in real-time, using smart devices with built-in sensors, thereby improving the ability of employees to collaborate among themselves and with customer and partners.
Businesses constantly face the challenge of increasing efficiency and reducing costs. Increasing visibility into existing processes and activities provides a way to improve performance. To improve visibility, businesses require collecting and disseminating detailed information about their fleets and delivery activities, and gaining control over the productivity of their resources and assets. Enabling critical applications onto mobile devices will extend the reach of the enterprise and provide visibility to improve processes where the real cost savings exist. From receiving information on current status of deliveries to allowing boundary-free access to corporate information, enterprise mobility applications have the potential to unlock new competitive advantages.
Sowri S. Krishnan is Vice President – Mobility, Cognizant.