How and where work is done in the future will accelerate the need to embrace the trend of enterprise mobility. There is no way to avoid that.
In a recent release, International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that the number of enterprise applications optimized for mobility will quadruple by 2016. Nevertheless, even though we know it is coming, people like me who serve in an operations and/or finance roles (I do both) are still having difficulty fully appreciating what that means to our parts of the organization.
The Future of Enterprise Mobility
It is hard to measure and, therefore, hard to get our arms around. Even though I can’t always quantify the effect mobility will have on the enterprise, there are three considerations that I cannot ignore. These considerations can have an effect on the top line, on margins, on non-product costs, or on all three collectively. They considerations are: Opportunity, Demand, and Fear.
Let’s take a look at the effect each of these bring.
Opportunity
Opportunity takes two forms, the first of which, is a better customer experience.
I know that better customer service translates to improved upsell opportunities, and greater customer retention. A field sales force, or a mobile customer service team, who can provide sales, service history, or the status of orders or requests while in front of their customer helps to improve customer experience.
Read: The Best Way to Use Mobile Apps to Empower Sales
Improved customer experiences lead to happier customers, which in turn, leads to more purchases and higher customer loyalty.
The second form of opportunity is improved productivity.
The same IDC release predicted that 30-40% of organizations deploying five mobile applications in 2015 will receive substantial agility benefits in their enterprise IT architecture. Whether it lowers costs to produce or serve, or it lowers cost to sell and administer, the bottom line is improved. Hopefully, it does both.
Read: How To Maximize Top Line Revenue With Enterprise Mobility
Demand
Demand can be driven from a number of sources. It can come from both customers or vendors, or, in some cases, both. But it will primarily come from either internal management or employees.
Internal management requests enterprise mobility to improve performance or productivity, or to keep employees happy. Keeping employees happy feeds into how they would drive enterprise mobility.
Today’s workforce is significantly different than those of the past. Employees are no longer tied to a physical location or restricted to specific operating hours. Ignoring that trend, and not introducing enterprise mobility into a company, may negatively affect morale, retention, and recruiting.
Fear
Fear is a big factor. I am constantly concerned about how my competitors will make themselves more customer friendly or find innovative ways to improve productivity and lower costs.
Again, IDC’s release predicted that competitive necessity will supersede productivity and efficiency for 50% of mobile enterprise app development in 2015. Either by making their customer experience more attractive or by being able to lower prices, this all results in ways to either steal my current customers or make myself less attractive to prospective customers.
That’s a huge threat I simply cannot disregard. And neither can you.
Moving Into the Future
How I conduct my business in the future will not be the same as how I conduct it today, which is not how I conducted it yesterday. While I still struggle to determine the positive effect of enterprise mobility, I understand that disregarding it would be at my own peril.
I can either climb aboard, or be run over.
I don’t like being run over.
How do you feel about these three considerations? How do they impact your perspective on enterprise mobility?