Over the past 20 years businesses have been deploying enterprise productivity applications and services that are generally poorly designed, boring, difficult to use and, unfortunately, don’t deliver any measurable improvements.
This is rapidly changing with the growing presence of smartphone and tablet apps in the enterprise. One of the greatest success factors behind iPhone and iPad (and most Apple products) is that the hardware and software is beautiful and easy to use. Thanks to Apple’s slick user interface (UI) and strict quality assurance requirements both consumer and enterprise apps have vastly improved and become more fun to use.
In this white paper we will give you 6 quick wins for Enterprise Mobility, so that your company can stay in control, drive adoption and generate real improvement within the organization.
1. 6 Quick Wins for Enterprise Mobility 2013
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WINS FOR
2. 6 Quick Wins for Enterprise Mobility 2013
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In the past improving personal productivity required attending courses, reading books and practicing the task over and
over again until you could change your behavior. For some people this worked but for most there was no change in
behavior since it required ongoing practice. Enterprise productivity initiatives through IT tend to perform even worse.
Over the past 20 years businesses have been deploying enterprise productivity applications and services that are gen-
erally poorly designed, boring, difficult to use and, unfortunately, don’t deliver any measurable improvements.
This is rapidly changing with the growing presence of smartphone and tablet apps in the enterprise. One of the greatest
success factors behind iPhone and iPad (and most Apple products) is that the hardware and software is beautiful and
easy to use. Thanks to Apple’s slick user interface (UI) and strict quality assurance requirements both consumer and
enterprise apps have vastly improved and become more fun to use.
In this white paper we will give you 6 quick wins for Enterprise Mobility, so that your company can stay in
control, drive adoption and generate real improvement within the organization.
3. 6 Quick Wins for Enterprise Mobility 2013
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Don’t reinvent the wheel or spend months on RFPs if
there are tools and services that can fulfill your needs
out-of-the-box. There are over 900,000 apps in both
Apple’s Appstore and Google Play; Apple alone offers
62,659 business apps.
Here are just a few examples of single function apps that
can be implemented today:
• Business card scanner: Using your mobile or tablet to scan
all business cards, such as Evernote Hello and LinkedIn’s
CardMunch, makes your contacts easily searchable and
accessible from your e-mail, as well as easily imported and
shared to CRM platform and colleagues.
• Photos of white boards with notes: Today, note taking for
meetings can range from actual diagrams, whiteboards, or
post-its on a wall. The easiest way to capture this valuable
information for later is with your devices’ camera. There
are 23,166 camera apps in the Appstore to help with this!
• Video recordings: There are lots of great apps, like Splice
and Viddy, to capture, trim, edit and change the audio for
video if you want to record and share a presentation by one
of your colleagues or at a conference.
• Cloud storage & document repository: Probably one of
the most commonly used 3rd party services today without
approval from internal IT is cloud storage to share documents
between teams and with clients. Why is this? It’s because
almost every 3rd party tool, such as Box, Dropbox and
Google Drive, beats internal document storage services.
• Expense reports: One of the most boring and time
consuming task for business travelers is expense reporting.
Fortunately there are already mobile tools, such as Expensify
and The Lemon, out there that allow you to speed up the
process as long as your company is flexible enough to
manage digital expense reports.
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Salesforce.com was by no means the first CRM tool or
even the first web based CRM tool, but it was one of the
first that looked beautiful and that was easy to use. Newer
apps and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools are reaping
the benefit of high adoption and usage by focusing on
ease of use.
Your employees are used to playing with great looking
consumer apps on their smartphone or tablet, so why
should business apps be any different? Make sure you
invest time in a great design, prototyping and user testing
before you start building any app. The apps adoption rate
and ROI will depend on it. In fact, a survey conducted
by research firm IDC shows that adoption of enterprise
social tools would improve employee and business partner
collaboration by 86%.
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With employees bringing their own devices to work and
filling apps with corporate content it’s more difficult to
impose strict rules on the use of 3rd party services in the
offices. This doesn’t mean that you should allow total app
anarchy; in fact only 22% of enterprises completely block
non-sanctioned applications, however, in a survey from
Symantec, 73% of employees say they access sensitive
corporate data on their smartphones. This being said, our
recommendation is:
1. Agree on a set of apps/tools to be used
2. Create a place (preferably a mobile site) where all approved
and recommended tools can be found
3. Clearly communicate usage and password policies. Re-
search from Kensington states that 70 million smartphones
are a lost per year. A protocol for what happens when
employees leave must also be planned as a Ponemon In-
stitude/Symantec study shows that 67% former employees
admitted to using their company’s sensitive information after
leaving.
4. Provide rules and guidelines to ensure that all data storage
is consolidated to a few locations including documents,
videos, photos, contacts, e-mail and more. Data storage
software firm EVault’s survey reports 53% of organizations
experienced a data loss in 2012.
5. Continuously enhance and update over time.
Most tools have a free version which can fulfill the user
needs but make sure that the department heads secure
a budget to upgrade to the premium versions if there is
a clear business case and positive ROI.
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The best new tools are not likely to be found by the IT or
procurement department, but your own employees. That
being said, it is important to have an open forum and
feedback channel where employees can suggest new
tools and best practices. This will make your employees
feel involved, responsible and engaged – also much more
likely to adopt and use the chosen apps and tools.
Lastly, ensure that you have a plan to incorporate some
of the proposed apps and tools in the guidelines so that
the feedback doesn’t become a black hole. You can take
the feedback from employees and use the information to
create a selection of apps for the workers.
Apple supports in-house app development and distribution
catalogs to fit specific businesses’ needs. Google Apps
also offers App Catalog, a mobile app and device man-
agement service. According to Aternity, 70% of businesses
have plans for a corporate store of mobile applications.
British Petroleum (BP), one of the world’s leading oil and
gas companies, did just this. After surveying their staff,
a special board was formed to audit the requested apps.
At the completion of the process, more than 70 apps were
selected to be added to an enterprise appstore.
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This is probably one of the most challenging parts be-
cause measuring productivity increases and ROI is always
difficult. On the bright side, according to an study by [x]
Cube labs 53% of enterprises says that an immediate
benefit of mobility is either operational and cost efficiency
or an increase in productivity and sales. A way to tackle
measurement is to provide a simple business template for
new tools that are being tested and measure the actual
results versus the business case on a small scale. Below
are critical questions to answer in measuring rewards:
Cost savings:
• How much time does the tool save me per day, per week
and per month? What does this amount to in cost savings?
Incremental revenue:
• What new things does the tool allow me to do that I wasn’t
capable of before? What is the financial gain of this?
Remember that not all productivity gains are measurable
or something you can measure across the entire organ-
ization. For example, if employees can get work done
on their commute to the office then this could mean a
substantial productivity gain but this has to be voluntary,
not something you can require employees to do.
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The challenge of working with various single service apps
and tools in isolation is:
• It becomes difficult to achieve economy of scale
• The organization will become fragmented
• Data may not be as secure
• No one will know what to do when an employee leaves or
changes role.
Over time you might want to evaluate how the tools can
be consolidated into one simpler experience to make an
even bigger impact for the organization. A CIO survey on
enterprise mobility, performed by CRC, shows that 70% of
organizations are planning to or already have implemented
custom mobile apps.
There are several great solutions, such as Golden Gekko’s
Meetr, with flexible functionality that you can:
• Get started quickly with minimum integration including
work flows, scheduling, document repository, data capture,
internal communication and more.
• Customize the solution with business specific features and
integrations to ensure you can improve ROI and keep up
with innovation.
In many cases there is not one product that will fit your
needs out-of-the-box so you have to build or adapt your
own solution. If that is the case you can still achieve
quick wins by choosing a solution that has the flexibility
plug-in with 3rd party services via APIs. Alternatively, you
can find an external supplier with experience of planning,
developing, and deploying mobile enterprise solutions to
consolidate the services and great user experience you
need into one customized enterprise app.
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We transform existing businesses and help create new industry leaders in the mobile space through our experience,
technology innovation, UX design and reliable quality solutions.
Meetr, built by Golden Gekko, is the next generation of enterprise mobile productivity solutions, supporting robust
backend integration, intuitive Design/UX, enterprise greade security as well as flexible configuration and deployment.
This being said, we understand each organization has unique requirements and built Meetr with the following flexibility:
• Configure branding, app copy & more
• Integrate with internal tools
• Enable or disable individual features
• Add custom features
Our services include service concept design, UX/UI design, native app, HTML5, mobile web and backend development,
quality assurance and distribution. With 1500+ projects delivered and 150+ clients we provide solutions for telecom,
retail, CPG, media, enterprise, government, healthcare/pharma, transportation and travel.