How the New Face of Mobility will Unravel in the Coming Days

The market dynamics are changing in terms of technology, economy and business demography. Disruptive technological innovations are transforming the world around us in unpredictable ways. A new era of "Digital Consumerism' is radically changing the way customers shop for products and services which is impacting the business and the entire consumer ecosystem. To cater to today's tech-savvy digital consumers, enterprises will have to redesign their IT delivery mechanism and leverage various disruptive technologies. Different technologies would be required to address different needs of today's consumers. Here, enterprise mobility is poised to fundamentally change the IT landscape. Mobile and other smart devices such as tablets are making technology central to how people live, work, and play thereby blurring lines between private and work technology use.

Momentum for mainstream mobility

Gartner predicts that in 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as web access devices while three billion of the world's population will transact with mobile Internet in 2014. Thus it is quite evident that consumers who use mobility extensively in their personal lives will be using it extensively in their professional lives as well. So the direction is quite clear and it is up to the enterprises, to take advantage of this trend, to shake things up and create new revenues for the company and new incentives for your customers and employees. It is a challenge for the enterprises to manage the disruption.

Purshottam Purswani, CTO, Atos India

The Catalysts of Growth

The growth of enterprise mobility will be accelerated by the trends cited below.

Increasing consumer demands, communication and collaboration

Due to increasing consumer demands, new mobile devices are being introduced in the market at a rapid pace. Smart mobility users are expecting e­mail and calendars to be available on their mobile device. In the era of highly mobile workforce, it is important to have voice, video, and messaging applications to be available on the mobile devices to enhance communication and collaboration between workforces.

Cloud-based mobile applications

A wide range of cloud-based enterprise mobile applications integrate mobility into enterprise IT. These applications provide anytime anywhere access to enterprise applications. These applications are used across various sectors such as:

1. Field Services - workflow approving field service dispatch, asset tracking, workforce management, engineering team mobilization and material & time confirmation

2. Manufacturing - work order dispatch, plant maintenance process optimization, plant maintenance, repair and construction, maintenance scheduling

and dispatch

3. Sales - sales force automation, product catalogue

4. Workflow - workflow management and incident management

5. Mobile BI - mobile BI focuses on reporting and dash-boarding on tablets and smartphones

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to be the next revolution following the WorldWideWeb. The vision of the IoT is to fuse the physical and digital worlds by bringing different concepts and technical components together. It aims to create a seamless network of billions of wireless identifiable objects that communicate with one another. Widespread use of smart devices is one of the key enablers of the IoT.

Key Business Drivers for Enterprise Mobility

1. Employee productivity - The cloud based-mobility applications brings all the enterprise data on the mobile devices of the employees thereby providing anytime anywhere access to critical resources and improving employee productivity.

2. Faster response times - For the field staff it is even more important as it improves their response time and gives them real time read-write access to enterprise data. Mobility apps make it possible to meet ever increasing customer demand for faster service resolution.

3. Better customer engagement - Innovative mobility applications help enterprises across verticals in engaging better with their customers in a completely new way. Some of the examples include enabling payments at door step using mobile point of sales, using NFC based shopping applications, providing mobile healthcare, etc.

4. Brand image - The innovation in mobility not only helps in productivity but also enhances the brand image of the organization.

Even though there are still challenges in terms of security, governance, technology and BYOD management, enterprise mobility is here to stay. It provides enterprises a new and challenging frontier to deliver their products and services in a fundamentally different manner. It brings the promise of harnessing increasing mobile workforce, boosting employee productivity and efficiency and also provides opportunities to drive new revenue.