Strategy to Reality – iPad Accelerating Enterprise Mobility
by Chuck Goldman on 23/03/11 at 5:00 am
Chuck Goldman is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Apperian, a mobile application development company and contributing editor for iPhoneCTO.
The Xconomists are one of the most talented and connected bunch around. The second annual Mobile Madness event did not disappoint with over 300 people in attendance. I was on the panel with Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, Ken Singer, CEO of Ondeego and Santiago Becerra, CEO of MeLLmo Roambi. The conversation was intense! Both partners and competitors strapped in for a great talk which was heated at times about the future of enterprise mobile Apps and the future of the Enterprise App Store. Three major points I’d like to make here:
1. Business to Employee Apps MUST be killer.
Your apps need to be as good if not better then the apps people are getting off a consumer app store. A warning to companies considering building their own mobile apps; “This is a one and done scenario. Don’t build crappy applications for your employees!”
For instance; leveraging location Metadata is critical and should be used to make apps smarter for your employees. The killer sales app automatically knows when you drive into a customer parking lot, queries your SAP/Oracle/Salesforce.com CRM data and displays the last 5 orders from that customer, builds a custom presentation that you present from your iPad, offers up the latest news regarding the product, and maybe even provides some just-in-time training and even links to pdfs that automatically highlights new feature sets, etc.
2. Crowd sourcing for Killer B2E App ideas.
Your employees can be the absolute best resource for killer app ideas. Genentech, Kraft, GE and other innovators have put out the formal “Call for Innovation in Mobile” and gotten back really transformative
ideas that will no doubt improve the lives of their employees through apps.
The key to crowd sourcing is WIIFM: What’s In It For Me. Besides the company building killer apps for employees; they also need to be compensated for these ideas. Giveaways like iPads or iPhones make great perks for great ideas. I have even seen companies give away dozens of Macbook Pros for employees who want to build their own apps and contribute them to the company in the name of productivity!
There are several great resources for this and my favorite is Appswell. Call Dan Sullivan at Appswell and he will help you understand how to leverage the collective intelligence of your workforce through this type of B2E crowd sourcing.
3. Enterprise App Stores
Four years ago Apple proved that the “App Store” is the de-facto standard for deploying and managing mobile apps. I remember back to the Palm
Treo days trying to download a
pps off the internet and pulling my hair out (see the picture to the right? I have none left!) trying to remember where all these URLS were for all the apps I downloaded. Each app had to be updated separately and that required going back to the website and at times, even entering in all my contact info again. So 1997. Today your company must leverage the EASE (pun referencing Apperian’s EASE software development kit) of use you get by setting up a great B2E App store that is a win-win for your IT staff and mobile workforce.
IT gets a fully secure/enterprise integrated environment to create, deploy and manage in-house apps.
Employees get a “no instructions required” way of getting internal apps over the air anytime they need to within the Enterprise App Store paradigm.
The industry is clearly moving from B2C to B2E apps in a big way. I have been banging the “ubiquitous enterprise mobility gong” since I was Director of Enterprise at Apple and now, spurred mostly by iPad, enterprises are taking mobile strategies built over the past 3 years and really diving into B2E app development this year. I am thrilled to have gotten Apperian into such a great position to help companies accelerate these efforts to build both killer apps for employees using our enterprise SDK for iOS and Android and then deploy and manage them securely using EASE.
Thanks again to Wade Roush and the fantastic team over at Xconomy for inviting me to this event. Here is to staying sane until the next Mobile Madness!
