The Promise of Mobile Business

Until very recently, I was mostly oblivious to the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend that appears to be getting more and more embedded in the fabric of enterprise IT. I now find myself owning a personal iPhone, Samsung Galaxy and a MacBook Air, all of which I use for work. In my case, the acquisition was largely driven by a desire to use what I believed would enabled me to be most productive. I had also become more and more frustrated with the length of time it took to boot up my laptop, let alone the weight. The MacBook Air was therefore a pretty compelling proposition. Email on my iPhone was more pleasing, and the Samsung Galaxy enabled me to create a mobile private Wifi hotspot using my personal 3G broadband sim card. All I need is an iPad Mini to complete the picture!

From a business point of view, these trends are having a  transformational impact, creating opportunities for new business models as user's expectations drive what IT needs to deliver. Think about your mobile experience for a minute. I find myself contemplating switching banks based on the user experience of the mobile banking application. And for enterprise IT, it is not simply a matter of getting the best application out of the door. Mobile applications have a much faster lifecycle, and are much more iterative than traditional applications. Enterprise IT therefore needs to adopt a much more agile application development and release lifecycle. And the challenges do not end there. They also have to cater for a fragmented landscape of devices and network providers.

That said, the opportunities that can be realized through mobile business are immense. In a recent tweet, I shared a link to an article on 19 Surprising Facts About Africa’s Mobile Market. The potential for leveraging the mobile platform for business is clear. What makes the mobile platform different and compelling is the flexibility it offers in terms of the multitude of applications available, the wide range of connectivity options, multimedia support, location awareness and other sensory capabilities.

While many recognize the opportunities available in the business to consumer space, the business-to-enterprise benefits are not very well understood. The mobile platform, when used effectively, can significantly enhance worker productivity, by enabling mobile workers to have access to the information and resources they need, wherever they are and when ever they need it. Throughout most of my IT career, I have been a mobile worker. The benefits to me personally and to my employer are obvious. I am able to work from home when family needs dictate without always having to take a day off. My colleagues are able to reach me even while I am traveling. The ability to work from home  makes me more productive. I do not have to incur the cost and time of traveling into the office every day. I reduce my carbon footprint, while my employer is able to reduce their personnel costs with schemes like Bring Your Own Device to work and by reducing office space to a bare minimum. In many instances, these benefits can be realized by simply extending existing applications to mobile workers and customers. I have personally witness many of my clients significantly improve customer satisfaction and increase revenue by leveraging the mobile platform to deepen their customer engagement. Developing a mobile strategy is clearly one of the ways organizations can differentiate themselves.

To many, context awareness is the new killer application. This relates to the ability to dynamically capture contextual information from mobile devices and use it to optimize and change communication and business flows. With context awareness, you can increase customer loyalty by delivering loyalty reward to a customer based on their unique needs at a given point in time. This concept can be extended to the enterprise with mobility-linked business processes. In this instance, business processes can be improved by capturing and automating process interactions where and when they occur.

Let's discuss the scenarios above using examples. In a customer loyalty use case, a retailer can offer an application for creating and managing shopping list. As a customer creates a list, their intended purchase could analyze against their historical shopping patterns, enabling the retailer to offer personalized shopping vouchers. The retailer's objective is to retain the shopper's business and capture a greater share of spend. The process of analyzing spending patterns and making an offer needs to be done at realtime. The PureData Systems for Analytics is designed to address petascale analytical workload requirements. In a business to business context, similar principles can be applied to deliver information to field workers just in time. In other words, consider an engineer working on an offshore oil rig. As they go about their job and input data into their mobile workpad, information can be analyzed in real time and the business process changed on the fly so  additional checks or maintenance is conducted. The same principles can be applied to other scenarios, e.g. optimizing supply chain and logistics planning, organizational learning to improving business outcomes etc.

Recognizing the opportunity mobile business presents, we have been working closely with some of our clients, leveraging the Worklight platform to enable them to create rich, yet cost-effective mobile apps in this fragmented technological landscape. A key piece of the capability we deliver is enterprise integration, enabling clients to connect to enterprise back-end services in a secure and scalable manner, while securely managing and controlling the growing portfolio of deployed enterprise applications.