Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
Out in the woods
Or in the city
It’s all the same to me
When I’m drivin’ free, the world’s my home
When I’m mobile
-- lyrics to “Going Mobile“ by The Who
When did we stop needing just a phone? With the continuing evolution of our portable devices, the telephony aspect of these tools can no longer claim to be the primary function--replaced by features and applications that are used across the globe in a variety of ways, faster than the speed of sound.
We travel with them and use them to give us directions, find businesses and services, verify our travel arrangements and provide us with linguistic assistance for international trips. We entrust then with access to our financial information and tell them to review our various banking and credit accounts, make a number of online purchases and pay our bills. We also use them in a number of entertaining ways of course, have them help us keep in touch with family and friends and utilize them to record events and surroundings.
Small to large, handheld to tablet--all have opened up our ability to interact with our personal and business worlds. Becoming less like an extravagance and more like an expectation and necessity, these tools have become highly integrated with who we are, both privately and professionally--and the demand has accelerated.
On the job, we want to be able to use these devices to get our e-mail and text messages, attend virtual meetings, manage customer relations, retrieve business data and run industry applications. Basically, everything we can do on the fly, regardless of if we should.
The speed of mobile technology change is increasing, too. Gartner foresees that by 2016, 50 percent or more of e-mail users at an organization will be utilizing “browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client” with a significant amount of work being dedicated to the development of “collaboration services” in general. Additionally, it is their belief that by 2015, development of applications for mobile devices will surpass those intended for the PC market by a ratio of 4 to 1.
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Because of this energy, enterprises are scrambling to keep up with a variety of resources necessary to support mobile technology.
Disruptive Yet Productive
Employees and customers alike are using mobile applications to interact with business operations and, in so doing, taxing the abilities of IT organizations to keep up. Until recently, many workplaces were predominantly designed to accommodate a standard wire-based system for computer device access. With the speed at which mobile advances are taking place, the services, processes and equipment that many workplaces have are experiencing operational challenges.
Mobile device and application access adds a touch of chaos when it comes to how it integrates with already established and “traditional” systems. For example, whereas there is a certain degree of predictability with regard to personal computer systems and their processes, the variability and complexity of how mobile technology operates and the fact that they run from a wide swath of services and locations poses some difficulty when trying to troubleshoot problems. Likewise, sharing a process between multiple devices, all supposed to be synchronized so there is no overlap, can create delivery nightmares--with service levels expected to have unnoticeable difference between them. The mobile world is in constant flux as well, with progress in portable devices being made in leaps and bounds, updated and enhanced in a much shorter timeframe than has been seen for everyday desk-based systems.
Ignoring the issues won’t make them go away, either. Like it or not, you’ll have to adapt a strategy and plan on how you are going to integrate mobile applications into your organization.
Moovin’ and Groovin’
Just as you have no doubt acted in the past with legacy systems, you’ll need to find new techniques in which to differentiate your mobile platform from that of your competition by running it better and faster. Customers and associates also need to see that performance is not an issue. This is particularly true when it comes to when they access any of your reporting and analytics applications, a tell-all of how efficient and effective your transactions are.
If you have different kinds of mobile applications at work, you will need a variety of tracking methods. Because some processes run chiefly on portable devices while others operate through browser techniques and other methods, each will require monitoring since both are often used at the same time. Additionally, since people like to have the latest and greatest toys (i.e., productivity devices), there will be an ever-changing landscape with respect to the various manufacturers and their affiliated operating systems. As a result, there is a need to keep an eye toward these changes and what kinds of impacts they will bring.
The people that demand mobile access may also provide an indication as to the user roles you need to support. Operations personnel need to be kept informed of equipment and system issues; sales staff want to be able to access presentations, collateral and data to help support their efforts; analysts require access to reports and queries for real-time information…the list goes on. Capturing details on these individuals can help define use profiles, but acting proactively with these associates can help establish what might be needed for the future.
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"To you I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal Opposition." - Woody Allen |
