THE MOBILE ENTERPRISE
By John Ragsdale, Vice President, Technology Research, TSIA
Of the 24 cross-discipline categories of technology covered by the TSIA 2010 Member Technology Survey, the number one top spending area was mobile enablement, with 34 percent of members having approved budget for increased mobility in 2010–2011. Service and support management should evaluate how adoption of mobile technology can streamline information access for both employees and customers, with impacts to operational costs, productivity, and increased adoption and success of self-service.
Mobile
Enablement: A Decade-Old Trend Finally Materializes
Enterprise application vendors began touting mobile capabilities a decade ago,
with wireless access protocol (WAP) applications delivered by several CRM
vendors as early as the late 1990s. Mobile access to content and even native
applications for mobile devices with rich UIs are now available from many
vendors, and customer interest and adoption is finally reaching critical mass.
With vendors spending big development budgets on mobile applications for 10
years or more, what drivers finally pushed consumer and enterprise customers to
jump on board? Three significant drivers are behind today’s mobile revolution:
- Device maturity. The single biggest challenge preventing enterprises from adopting early mobile tools was device maturity. By the time a company would select and implement a mobile platform, the devices required to run the applications were obsolete. Early mobile leaders such as Palm released new versions so quickly that mobile platforms and devices were a moving target. Today’s devices, such as RIM’s BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone, have provided more stable development environments with application support regardless of device model or OS version.
- Mass adoption of smartphones. For many years, deciding on Palm, Windows CE, or “lowest common denominator” WAP applications meant supplying new devices for users, as no single company owned the major market share for enterprise smartphones, and consumer adoption was minimal. This has changed dramatically, with business users adopting the BlackBerry en masse, and Apple’s phenomenal success with the iPhone putting smartphones in the hands of millions of consumers—adoption higher than even Apple anticipated.
- Demand for 24x7 information access. The mass adoption of smartphones, along with younger workers entering the workplace who grew up in the Internet Age, has created a demand for instant access to information at any time from anywhere. The nine-to-five mentality of both employees and customers has disappeared, with users demanding 24x7 access to information from their fingertips.
To further explore this topic, visit:
- Knowledge Anywhere: Leveraging Mobility to Put Content at Point of Interaction
- Mobile Enablement: Three Phases of Sophistication
- Getting Started
- Read the 3-Part Mobility Enablement Research Series
- Conference Presentation with Audio Overlay: "Knowledge Anywhere: The Mobile Enterprise"