Cross-enterprise mobility is offering huge opportunity for change, enabling businesses to run more efficiently and effectively as a result. Yet there are many things your current application systems vendor won’t tell you about mobility. In an interview with Alan Williams, CTO of BlinkMobile, we reveal what questions to ask to ensure you won’t get caught out.

The importance of cross-enterprise mobility.

Smartphones and tablets offer not just the chance to go mobile but to use the technology to redefine the services that you offer. “They provide a wonderful opportunity to improve business processes, staff efficiency and quality of service,” says Williams. However he says that businesses should not just look at the one-off opportunities they offer but the longer term benefits too. “Most companies are only just scratching the surface with mobility. It’s about harnessing innovative capability and services to do much more than just extend existing application systems out to mobile.  It’s about being able to create activity-oriented user interactions that weave together the best capabilities of devices and services with your existing systems to deliver significant savings and dramatically transform existing processes”.

However he says the challenge is setting your organisation up to consistently and reliably deliver these solutions, enabling you to not only produce apps that work across all devices and can follow you across different formats but also integrating them into your existing systems as well as new outside services. “It’s also about harnessing the advances in cloud-based services, utilities and infrastructure that are exponentially expanding the capabilities of what can be economically delivered and doing all of this without having to have mobile-specialised developers and without having to manage the technology risk normally associated with constant change,” says Williams.

Why Enterprise Mobility Platforms work.

Williams believes a good platform provides far more than just a development environment.  “It adds value to all of the main aspects of long-term post-PC user enablement, namely development, deployment, control, integration and operation.  It also enables the harnessing of cloud-based services, and making it easy to address each of these ‘problem domains’ is the focus for Enterprise Mobility Platforms such as the Blink Mobility Platform.”

What is the opportunity for cross enterprise mobility?

Williams believes the opportunity for enterprise mobility is huge. “There are vast numbers of business processes that are ripe for improvement in almost any large organisation,” he says. However he says many companies have yet to realise the opportunity. “Although many enterprises have made significant commitments into their “cornerstone” customer facing applications there are relatively few that have established a long term enterprise-wide strategy for delivery of activity-oriented apps that provide process improvement throughout their organisations,” he says. Although Williams concedes that there isn’t a single “right” way to approach this problem, he says that architectural products such as Enterprise Mobility Platforms will play a major part in helping organisations to manage the complexities and risks of multi platform, multi OS, multi format delivery. “Those organisations that don’t buy a platform will still need to solve the multiple problem domains themselves to streamline development, to minimise long-term cost of delivery and to maximise flexibility to take advantage of change,” he warns.

When will the potential be realised?

Williams says that already a minority of organisations have established enterprise-wide mobility strategies but says most are still in tactical mode. “We expect — and this is supported by numerous research studies — that most large organisations will establish a more coherent strategy over the next two to three years,” he says.

Six key questions you should ask your vendor before they sell you mobilised versions of their product offering…

• Am I limiting my view of how my users are going to work in the field to the application vendor’s systems view?
• Am I limiting the amount of mobile device contextual information my users can gather because the application vendor’s core system was never designed with this in mind?
• Does my application vendor support all devices, OS types and formats because as new developments arise I don’t want to be limited by their support choices?
• Will my users end up with a mass of different applications to support different aspects of their workday, each with a different device support matrix, each with their own upgrade schedule, their own look and feel, navigation, etc that will be hard to manage?
• Will my application vendor keep up with new developments in mobility quickly enough so that I can take advantage of great new features and new devices?
• Is my application vendor going to help me to integrate other systems into their mobile solution? Alternatively, would it be better to first look at what interactions would deliver the highest value to my differing groups of mobile users and then draw on the back-end systems that support those interactions, which most likely will be more than one system or a single source of information?

Blink Mobile will be exhibiting at Apps World on stand 451b arrange to meet them here