It was clear from my meeting that the collaboration was more than a press release partnership. Each company has dedicated resources to the effort and they work together as a team. The collaboration combines IBM’s extensive enterprise knowledge and technology solutions with Apple’s user experience prowess to deliver a set of highly usable, transactional and contextual mobile enterprise applications. A list of types of apps can be found here. The solutions are available to enterprise customers in banking, retail, insurance, financial services, telecommunications and governments. The companies also announced several clients that include
Today companies are struggling to build mobile apps. Over 75 percent of companies Lopez Research surveyed planned to build 10 or more mobile apps in the next 12 months. Many companies don't know which apps to mobile enable nor how to build them. Mobile apps require enterprise systems integration, device management, security and a new suite of development tools. IT is trudging through a quagmire of choices. An enterprise mobile first app must offer more than just a pretty graphical user experience. It has to be transactional and deliver new value.
IT needs mobile management to distribute, manage and secure apps. They also need on-premise software or cloud solutions for application development, such as IBM’s BlueMix and Cloud Marketplace. The IBM MobileFirst solutions for iOS offer those services as well as end-to-end procurement, financing, deployment and lifecycle management. (MobileFirst is IBM’s branded term and the overall marketplace calls these types of apps mobile first apps.) Support is also a challenge. Hence, Apple added AppleCare for the Enterprise to provide 24/7 support for Apple devices using their customer support group. IBM delivers on-site or customized support services. If you need someone to help you design an app, you can also work with IBM's services arm. Resources from Apple and IBM work together to design these mobile apps.
It isn’t easy to build a compelling mobile enterprise app and it’s more than just a technology problem. In my meeting with Apple and IBM, the companies noted business processes must also change to take advantage of mobile. Mobile provides access to new types of contextual data, such as device type, connectivity quality, location, motion, and environmental conditions, such as temperature. It enables advanced data capture with voice, photography and video. And it also offers the opportunity to layer in voice, SMS and video communications. Existing PC enterprise apps and business processes weren’t designed to collect and react to sensor and contextual data. Building mobile apps requires a company to think differently or they’ll never build an app that crosses the chasm from the legacy PC world into the modern era.
Enterprise apps must become more like consumer apps that deliver the right information, in the right format, at the right moment. This is how the market defines a mobile first app. These apps are not merely updates or an evolution of existing PC apps. These apps are an entirely new species. The apps that Apple and IBM have announced as part of their collaboration illustrate what an enterprise mobile first app should look like. From my perspective, mobile first apps are:
- Beautiful yet transactional. The first wave of consumer mobile apps was pretty but it took several iterations for these apps to deliver transactional capabilities. Consider the evolution of airline apps. These apps started by providing simple yet useful information such as flight status. Today, an airline app allows me to check in, change my seat and book a flight. I can reserve a car from Uber to the airport from my airline app and the app tells me how long it will take to get to the airport in current traffic conditions. This is a contextual application that links to third party data (traffic and Uber or taxi services). These B2C apps link to multiple enterprise back end systems as well as cloud resident data and services. Business to employee apps should offer the same richness of data and ease.
- Targeted versus complex. Existing enterprise apps offer users every feature possible. Before mobile, it was commonplace to judge the quality of an app based on the number of features they offered. In truth, more features typically yielded greater app complexity. Most users only consume a fraction of the available features in any of their enterprise apps. The challenge with mobile is to pick the right set of features.
- Intuitive. Mobile first enterprise apps require minimal if any training. You know you’ve built a great mobile app if your users will choose to use the smartphone or tablet app when they are sitting next to their PC.
- Contextual. As noted above, mobile apps should incorporate contextual elements, such as location and sensor data, to enhance a workflow.
- Learning and Predictive. Over time, the app should learn how a person uses it and what type of information is most useful. Eventually the app will be able to predict what data or functions would be most useful given a user’s current context.
The apps that Apple and IBM released today illustrate a majority of the traits above. The concept of learning and predictive is a new field for everyone. Given IBM’s heritage in analytics, I’m sure we’ll see compelling examples of this moving forward. However, I fear these apps will be met with the same skepticism as the original iPhone launch. Companies focused on the lack of features or apps. I expect many companies will say these apps don’t reflect the complexity of their process or the challenges in their industry. And that is exactly what people said about the iPhone. It was deceptively simple yet incredibly powerful. This simplicity changed the mobile industry and the application landscape. The same evolution will happen with business apps.
Market leaders will rethink their company’s existing business processes and challenge the status quo. App developers should to integrate contextual data and link to third-party data into new mobile apps. IT and the business units should leverage the power of new analytics engines to deliver insights at just the right moment. And these apps need to offer consistent data and workflows that can move seamlessly across devices. Mobile demands ruthless simplification. This doesn’t mean that app lacks functions. It means the app offers the right functions.
Mobile first apps are difficult to design and many companies fear change. These are times of great change but great also great opportunity. You must not be afraid. You can't hold onto the ways of the past. However you choose to build apps, you must find a way to bridge to the past while embracing the future. Executives that embrace the art of possible, as Apple and IBM have demonstrated in their apps, will be able to transform their business and create competitive advantage.
