As more and more companies grow aware of the benefits of mobility, they’ll also realize a critical fact: that without engaged employees, enterprise mobility can never succeed.
Put another way, unless employees embrace mobility and use the company’s mobility solutions for their intended purpose, the enterprise will never fully realize the gains in productivity, efficiency, and any number of other cost-saving effects that mobility can bring.
So: what’s the key to enterprise mobility adoption?
In a recent piece for IT ProPortal, Daniel Kraft coins a concept that we think may be an answer: “employee empowerment.”
“In every success we’ve seen in enterprise mobility so far,” says Kraft, “there’s been one major recurring theme: a company’s ability to take something that was once complex and present it in an easy, convenient way to its people.”
Does your app simplify what was once a complex process? Allow salespeople to meet with more customers? Make securely communicating easier? If it does, you’re empowering employees and starting out your mobility program on the right foot. If your apps don’t make life easier, it may be that you’ve simply taken a desktop function and made it mobile without improving the process.
Kraft’s observation has held true in our client work, too. Transforming the business with the help of mobility is difficult, but makes the long-term effects so much more rewarding. Compared to an app that just takes an old process and puts it on users’ phones, an approach to mobility that’s designed to capitalize on the benefits of mobility and streamline key business processes is much more likely to deliver higher ROI as time goes on.
Is employee empowerment as we’ve explained it here the only key to increasing adoption rates of mobility in the enterprise? Hardly. Ease of signup, software updates, convenient app store search, and reliable apps are just a few of the many other factors that impact adoption. That said, we agree with Kraft that employee empowerment will likely be a critical element at the center of any successful enterprise mobility strategy.
For long-term mobility success, your mobile apps must make your users (from employees to contractors) more efficient. Even if you have everything else in place, without that element of employee empowerment, you’ll have a difficult time finding success.
