Contents 01 - Introduction 02 - Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere 03 - Mobile An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key 04 - Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success 05 - Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple 06 - About Nutshell - For More Information - Customer Service Contents 2
Introduction Mobile technology has brought about new, exciting possibilities enhancing productivity, collaboration and communication. Introduction 3
Introduction You don t need us to tell you how fast mobile is growing and how profoundly it s changing our lives. Mobile technology has brought about new, exciting possibilities enhancing productivity, collaboration and communication. And that effect hasn t just been felt in our personal lives, but at work, too. 60% of workers now use mobile apps for work-related activity, with the number of mobile workers expected to surpass 1.3 billion this year. Smartphone adoption is on a phenomenal upward curve, and 54% of ipad users primarily use their device for work purposes too that s opposed to 42% who primarily cite personal use. Once upon a time it would have seemed outlandish to suggest that mobile would eventually outnumber and even replace business desktops. However, businesses are increasingly relying on mobile devices for timely and cost efficient workflows. Introduction 4
Change never happens by accident, so, as that tide inevitably rises, the question is clear: Do you have a comprehensive mobile strategy, coordinating all the needs of your business that can act as a clear road map to effectively drive your business transformation? In this e-book, we ll explain why we believe it is mission critical to create and implement a comprehensive internal mobile strategy for your business. We ll discuss in detail the opportunities and challenges you ll face and explain how an effective strategy can help your business win when it comes to mobile! 5
Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere Over half of the highest performing IT teams have already deployed enterprise app stores... Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere 6
Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere As mobile use has soared, many businesses have sought to embrace the change by introducing enterprise apps specifically created to increase internal efficiency. Over half of the highest performing IT teams have already deployed enterprise app stores, and 25% are now using department-specific apps to support a variety of internal processes. Working on mobile devices increases work efficiency by 53%, with enterprise apps boosting productivity by 34%. This equates to around 240 extra hours of work per employee based on a 40 hour work week, that s an extra six working weeks! Clearly, businesses that have their house in order when it comes to mobile are beginning to reap rewards. Whether it s streamlining and eliminating paper trails, or improving processes for internal and remote workers, mobile strategies are the future for any size of organisation. Enterprise mobility apps are leading the way toward a paperless office. With the average British office worker printing a staggering 1,584 sheets of paper every month, the financial and efficiency increases are measureable. Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere 7
The list of potential uses for enterprise apps are endless. When harnessed properly, internal apps can have a huge bottom line effect. Many companies are continuing to implement Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) programmes. This approach allows employees to use personally purchased devices to access enterprise applications and data. A recent study revealed as many as 80% of mobile devices at organisations were employee owned. Key advantages to operating a BYOD strategy include increased employee satisfaction, IT cost savings and productivity. The BYOD program creates new ways to progress and improve efficiency and effectiveness inside the organization, however businesses need to fully understand the implications of allowing enterprise data to be accessed on personal devices. What data can employees access? What security measures are in place if the device is lost, stolen or compromised? Mobile devices and applications will continually offer opportunities for innovation. Expanding access and driving innovation will ultimately be the lasting impact of the BYOD phenomenon. Mobile and Business: Anytime, Anywhere 8
Mobile: An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key Of course, the rush to mobile hasn t been plain sailing. Like all radical change, it comes with its share of challenges, too... Mobile: An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key 9
Mobile: An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key To many sceptics, a move to mobile rather than a bright opportunity represents a relinquishing of control. Technology has created a new working pattern, and this change continues to unfold. In today s ultra-competitive and intrinsically global workplace, employees are expected to collaborate across geographical boundaries and time barriers. They want 24/7 access to their emails and project management systems. And business processes need to move quickly and efficiently to stay ahead of the competition. Many resourceful employees, if not provided with a company-sponsored option, will resort to using their own systems and processes. Emailing files to themselves; using their personal calendars on their personal devices; storing files in SaaS solutions like Google Drive; and using complicated Excel spreadsheets in an attempt to keep on top of business-critical functions. Mobile: An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key 10
This approach is littered with problems. Can you honestly say all your company s sensitive/proprietary information is protected? Are files being backed up so they can be restored in the case of accidental or malicious data loss? (Hint: they re almost certainly not!) What happens from a business continuity point-of-view if that employee subsequently leaves the company? Do you have access to their files? Are those spreadsheets easy for other team members to pick up, understand and continue to use? Mobile: An Opportunity and a Challenge: Strategy and Accountability are Key 11
Regardless of organisational size, when employees use their own systems and processes, you re more likely to get chaos than collaboration. Place this situation within a typical enterprise company with its various divisions and sub-teams, and the impact can be catastrophic. The logical conclusion is that you need a mobile strategy to manage this. Of course this includes considerations about devices themselves will you provide them as a business, or adopt a BYOD policy? How will you ensure data is safe and regularly backed up? Can devices be remotely locked and wiped? Is data properly encrypted? Cost, security, ease of use, support and connectivity are all key considerations. You ll also, crucially, need to specify which enterprise apps your teams should be using to fulfil their roles and ensuring you deliver products that can do the job they need to do. 12
Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success The starting point to understanding and improving internal processes and collaboration is establishing how teams communicate and collaborate... Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success 13
Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success The bread and butter of your mobile strategy is answering the question, how will mobile help our employees do their job more effectively? The starting point to understanding and improving internal processes and collaboration is establishing how teams communicate and collaborate! Identify areas for obvious improvement, speak to key stakeholders in your business and try to build a picture of which processes are particularly painful, tedious or time-consuming. These processes are often low-hanging fruit that, with quite little effort or thought, can produce immediate and striking results boosting productivity and efficiency almost overnight. Enterprise mobility, by definition, can cover a wide spectrum of different processes. What enterprise mobility essentially enables is the creation of productive work environments, empowering people and transforming business processes. They facilitate sales, communication and training by connecting to your existing back end systems. Let s look at a few scenarios to get you thinking about internal apps and how they can improve your business processes: Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success 14
Holiday Scheduling booking annual leave in many businesses remains an archaic, paper-heavy process. How about a mobile app through which employees can request and view their holidays? Expenses expenses claims can be the bane of HR professionals existence and the process is notoriously fussy for employees, too. The action of filling out a physical paper form, attaching it to a boat load of receipts and invoices, and handing them physically to HR is commonplace. What if you could use an internal app to route these claims, using your mobile phone camera to snap a picture of those receipts and attach them to your digital claim? This greatly reduces the paper trail, eliminates the hassle of collecting receipts and invoices, and makes the whole process more efficient and simple. Signature Collection we all appreciate the value of getting important documents signed. Printing, posting and receiving documents or consent forms that require signatures can be time intensive. Research shows document turnaround can be reduced by as much as 90% through the use of signature capture apps. Collaboration for Remote Workers an Enterprise Mobility Strategy is no longer just a great work aid, adoption is fast becoming a necessity for the entire business world, particularly for disparate workers - whether it s remote workers, couriers, long-haul truck drivers, airport mechanics or other field based roles. Disparate roles often lack a way to communicate with the rest of the business to let them know what s happening outside, and, of course, vice versa. Data Capture if you re into sales and marketing and you ve ever attended a conference or expo with the aim of generating leads, you ll appreciate how fussy the process of gathering those details can be. You can end up with a stack of business cards or, worse, reams of paper containing data capture forms that then need to be manually entered into your database. What if you could create an internal app that allowed attendees to fill out a form on a tablet device, which then sent their details directly and automatically to your CRM system? Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success 15
Working on your own Enterprise Mobility Strategy will highlight where a shift in work habits could benefit overall goals. You ll be able to identify when people spend more time working away from the office, and highlight a range of mobile devices and cloud services they use to do their job. Map out your work streams and discover the possibilities for implementing positive change. Once you ve identified or reiterated key areas for implementation, take a critical look at some of the apps you re already using within your business. Are there any that are particularly imperfect? Is there some functionality missing? And, crucially, could you look to build a bespoke solution that filled in those blanks? Identifying Opportunities: Define Your Criteria for Mobile Success 16
Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple Building apps to incorporate into your mobile strategy comes with its own fair share of difficulties. Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple 17
Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple Research shows that the bulk of mobile applications in use within enterprises are custom-built for specific situations, with the most frequent scenario being in-house development (38%) or development that s contracted to external developers. (25%) There are obvious, non-technological barriers to incorporating enterprise apps into your business strategy resistance to change, culture and lack of internal buy-in, although these can often be overcome when the app is built by the team, for the team. It s important to ensure that teams are consulted as part of this process. Next come the technical problems; lack of skills and, of course, costs and time efficiency. Building an app sounds intimidating. There s no doubt that it can be expensive and time-consuming to build your mobile app traditionally; you can expect it to take anywhere from 4-8 weeks and cost an average of 16,000. Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple 18
While some decision-makers are still reluctant to embrace mobile and need to be convinced of its value, we re generally seeing more people view its ROI more subjectively and, through taking the decision to adapt, achieving great results. This underscores the fact that enterprise mobility doesn t just boil down to technical nuts and bolts but a change in behaviours and mind-sets. With business models and employee behaviours changing, it is clear mobile is no longer an optional extra, but a necessity. An effective mobile strategy will enable more accessible and intuitive business processes engaging and inspiring employees to up their productivity.. 19
Wrap Up Mobile isn t just the future it s the present, too. In today s competitive marketplace, efficiency and productivity count for so much. Embracing mobile technology is a great way to help you keep pace with the competition, and the message is simple: keep up, or risk being left behind. There are companies that truly understand enterprise mobility, and recognise the importance of investing in a digital experience for employees. The enterprise mobility ethos isn t about technology, rather it is about changing behaviours and working patterns. When you re deciding how to build your apps, you have a clear decision to make: Take it to a third party developer; build it from scratch using advanced coding; or source a platform that allows you to build a fully customisable app. A platform like Nutshell allows even the less technically savvy to design and build bespoke, purpose-built apps in a matter of minutes. Overcoming Challenges: Making Mobile Simple 20
About Nutshell Nutshell is an innovative, zero coding, drag and drop app building platform. With the right platform, you can stay better connected, boost engagement and power smarter decisions through effective internal communication. For More Information To find out how Nutshell Apps can help your business realise more powerful business processes, visit us at www.nutshellapps.co.uk. Customer Support We offer discounts and special pricing for academic and non-profit institutions. For more information please contact us at support@nutshellapps.co.uk.