By Fred Balboni, IBM
Stop for a minute and consider the level of transformation the smartphone in your hand has created in just the handful of years since the re-architecting of our most basic connections to people, services and knowledge began with the debut of the original iPhone.
Now, these devices and the apps they deliver are about to unlock another great wave of change. Except this time, the change is going to start in our business lives, rather than our experiences as consumers. And don't worry if you're not currently a "business professional." Your experience as a consumer of the services provided by the world's institutions is going to be transformed for the better along the way. At the same time, services such as as travel, home repair, or the effectiveness of first responders will all benefit from smart technology and solutions.
This is transformation delayed. The world's enterprises heretofore haven't trusted mobile devices on issues such as the security of data, ease of management or integration with the rest of the company's information. And there's the nontrivial issue of experience.
We all have a lot of "wow" moments with consumer apps, but not so much with the tools and technologies we use at work.
We've moved some activities and applications from one device -- a laptops or desktop -- to a tablet or phone. But we haven’t done the hard work of thinking about how we can take what makes mobile special, or the native capabilities of the device themselves, such as GPS, near-field communication, a microphone or a camera and combine them with with the instant connection to the collective knowledge of a company or create the ability to analyze and extract insights in the moment. This combination is all coming together to create a new path to professional proficiency. In effect, we can make all our employees as good as our best employees.
What's happening is a basic redefinition. The suite of made-for-business apps being announced today, MobileFirst for IOS, will effectively transform our notions of what an app is and does. We might need a new term. Consider:
- At first, apps were a cool access point to a narrow source of data: weather reports, radio, news, maps, traffic conditions or a way to order a car service.
- Then, they were used for the broader ecosystem, such as mail, calendaring or contact lists via iCloud.
- And now, apps will be available that are full-scale business solutions, funnelling the entire collected and prioritized intelligence of an enterprise into the hands of all kinds of business professionals, such as flight attendants, loan officers, insurance agents, and yes, even the cable guy. That's a basic transformation of the nature of work, job role by job role. That's new value for business. And ultimately, that's a world that works better and smarter, for you and me.
The airline industry, for instance, is battling thin margins and is dealing with fuel as its major expense line item. A fuel-planning app that gives pilots analytic insight into their decisions about how much discretionary fuel to load onto planes can save the carrier tens of millions of dollars a year. And the interface is so intuitive it might be the first corporate IT tool that requires virtually no training time.
For insurance agents, who are facing the timeless dilemma of every service provider that's managing big numbers of clients, their days are always perfectly planned -- until their day starts. And then begins the random acts of traffic or weather, billing or the search for new prospects or a range of client-related events, and all the associated tradeoffs and compromises. Some agents manage the situation better than others. Our app delivers the analytics to improve the performance of all agents.
In the financial sector, small business owners need bankers, but have a hard time getting to a bank. Our small business advisor allows bank loan officers carry bank data to a small business, to do scenario modeling, and complete secure transactions, on the spot.
The iPhone transformed the way we approach our daily lives. Mobile represents the next great evolution in business transformation. That change is really just beginning, with massive levels of spontaneous development and entirely new vistas of business value opening before us. But what's not in doubt is that the experience matters. The experience of the individual, in fact, is everything. And when we bring a consumer-quality experience to business professionals, across myriad job roles, that's progress for business, for the world, and for each of us.
Fred Balboni is General Manager of the IBM Apple Partnership.
