When evaluating mobile applications it’s easy to get caught up in the “flashy” and “new”, shifting focus away from driving utilization of the app – the most critical success factor. Even through widely used cloud-based applications like Salesforce.com and Workday are going mobile and increasingly adding feature rich products to solution suites, many users are seeing a widening gap in mobile functionality and an over complication in their offerings. In trying to go mobile instead of being mobile-first, many business application providers have lost sight of the end goal; how to best leverage mobile devices to transform core business functions and provide true value to the business end-user. This way, your business can avoid over complication and diminishing value.
Though there are varied strategies around increasing end-user adoption and driving product innovation, most analysts can agree that the last thing you want to do is overwhelm users with new features that do little to actually enable the related business process(es). It seems as though many software companies overcompensate in features. Instead they should be looking to act as the vehicle for mobilizing elements that are part of a broader strategic plan.
Salesforce.com is certainly an industry leader in flexibility and integration, but this muddles usability, resulting in confusion. If your solution is difficult to use and over complex, it’s that much harder to hone in on what the essential use cases are so that the mobile app is a useful tool. In addition, you can curtail adoption and cannibalize the number of end-users that may have otherwise transitioned over to the corresponding mobile app. This drastically effects overall data quality and limits collaboration of two key drivers: leveraging cloud based solutions and more specifically CRM software. Rather than overwhelm and frustrate users, many companies are choosing to rollout enterprise mobile apps that mobilize a core set of business processes and that also offer features and functions that transform mobile devices into a catalyst for enablement.
It may be seem logical to switch toward more focused mobile business apps, but the human tendency to sway toward the ‘bigger and better’ option continues to hold true and will continue to hold us back. What is it about “everything-you-could-possibly-need” that is so prevalent in today’s business technology culture? The value gets lost and the initiative is eventually abandoned.
How are you approaching the process of determining what parts of your business to mobilize? How are you going to leverage mobile enablement in a way that add true value to your enterprise end-users?
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