Adrian Leow, a Principal Research Analyst in the Mobile and Client Computing group of Gartner writes about enterprise mobility trends in 2016, as well as key development observed in 2015. He has some very interesting predictions for trends in 2016.
We couldn’t agree with him more than on this prediction from his top 5 list:
Mobile-First Expectations Will Expose Lagging Organizations: Mounting evidence shows how mobile technologies are becoming increasingly ingrained in people’s lives — and changing human behaviors.
Mobility-lagging organizations will suffer negative impacts such as key-employee resignations. Smart and skilled knowledge workers, both in IT and business roles, will become frustrated with their organizations’ failure to provide access to easy-to-use, productivity-enhancing mobile apps. Many of these workers will leave companies in search of a more modern working environment.
Other negative repercussions for mobility-lagging organizations include the lower productivity that is caused by the use of anachronistic tools and procedures, as well as reduced satisfaction levels caused by poor mobile support — not just among employees but, even more critically, among customers and business partners. These organizations will also face increasing competitive pressure from rivals that more-effectively embrace mobility — and are therefore better able to satisfy customers, build productive work environments and attract top talent.
In B2B or business-to-employee (B2E) applications, a similar challenge remains. Utility still must be present, or the investment is wasted. Yet the utility of many enterprise applications exists today in the form of traditional PC or Web applications. Thus, the value for the additional utility of apps that extend existing applications would be small if it were measured purely based on the existence of a feature. However, the real value for mobility in the enterprise comes from well-designed, well-timed “business moments” that allow for the creation or continuation of a business process while seamlessly being interwoven with key aspects of the user’s life. The transaction may be the same transaction as before, but the context in which the transaction is completed opens up additional business value — and it is only a well-designed experience that will gain the adoption needed to scale this value.
Users will be quick to abandon a mobile capability with a poor UX and return to what they already know — the PC application they have used for years (or worse, better-designed apps outside your organizational control). This is evident even in large-scale, well-funded mobile products like productivity suites — the inherent UX challenges of using mobile devices for complex content creation quickly lead users to return to their laptops for in-depth productivity suite tasks. Therefore, your mobile capabilities must motivate usage based on the UX alone, or your users will return to what they already know.
At bigtincan, we see the importance of getting the right content to the right user at the right time and location as critical to ensuring that mobile workers will be highly productive. Embedding content into work processes and optimizing it for how people work with content while using their mobile devices absolutely requires a mobile 1st design approach.
