Everything You Have Been Told About Mobility is Wrong Myth #5

Mobility Myth #5
It’s too difficult to deliver job-specific mobile apps

Organizations know their people must be connected, but the cost, complexity and security risks of doing so have kept mobile solutions from being a critical part of their business strategy planning, much less its execution. As a result, most companies tend to invest only in solutions they can deploy quickly with a minimum impact on their operations.

What’s more, many companies often invest in mobile solutions for the least mobile employees in their workforce. Those are workers who may benefit from mobile collaboration tools — such as shared calendars, project workspaces, web conferencing and the like — yet they actually don’t need access beyond those applications to be productive.

That’s hardly the case for the many mission-critical employees who are totally mobile and more than likely don’t even have a desk. These are the workers who do the majority of work around the world — in field service, on the manufacturing floor, on the retail floor and in home healthcare.

The biggest bang for the buck is delivering mobile solutions to help them do their work more efficiently and effectively. These workers all carry mission-critical performance metrics – their success defines whether the company goes bankrupt or dominates the market. Therefore, business leaders should consider this work group to represent the most potential for business performance improvement.

For these mobile workers, a job-specific, touch-optimized application delivered on a professional-grade tablet is the only way to go. They need enterprise-enabled applications, capable of use on and off the network. These apps can help liberate them from cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone paper processes. They also can help streamline their access to information, facilitate greater collaboration and help them respond to customer or client needs much more quickly.

The question then becomes: How can organizations create or port these types of applications cost-effectively in the shortest possible time? Organization leaders know their IT resources are already stretched to the limit. Adding one more item to IT to-do lists might require big trade-offs against other priorities.

At the same time, many leaders want a key role in developing applications. In fact, research found that 55 percent of North American business decision makers agree with the statement, “Technology is too important for the business not to be involved.” And business leaders should be involved, to ensure the applications meet business needs before a full roll out, instead of having to fix them afterward (potentially costing money and time and causing work disruptions).

So, if IT’s plate is already full, what options do line-of-business owners have to get the applications they want? IT professionals know what happens all too well: They look for a workarounds, often turning to “shadow IT” resources (i.e., outside vendors) for seemingly quick solutions. Usually without realizing it, but the executives may well end up adding to IT’s workload if an application doesn’t work out as planned or, worse, disrupts other IT-enabled processes.

For the many organizations that lack in-house resources to develop or migrate enterprise-grade applications for mobile environments, Dell’s Mobility Application Services teams can help. We can assist with building and implementing solutions that meet the needs of your business while at the same time ensuring that your data always remains secure.

From initial consulting to development, testing and deployment, Dell Mobility Application Services consultants will collaborate with your internal IT and business leaders as a single-source partner to help you envision and realize your mobile application strategy.

They follow a proven, five-step methodology to determine the best approach for developing specific mobile applications. It can help reduce or eliminate project risks associated with schedule, budget and scope creep.

In addition, our User Experience consultants can help you capture your ideas and provide mock-ups to help you visualize your concept, which then serve as wireframes for application development. Plus, our Mobility Center of Excellence can add tremendous value for complex or companywide engagements, when you may need to integrate business teams and their requirements with IT policy and budgets.

Dell takes a unique view of mobility in the enterprise. Seeing the potential upside is balanced by an in-depth understanding of the overall IT strategy. This allows Dell to help customers build a strategy that delivers performance while satisfying IT’s demanding requirements.