6 quick wins for enterprise mobility

6 Quick Wins for Enterprise Mobility 2013

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WINS FOR


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In the past improving personal productivity required attending courses, reading books and practicing the task over and over again until you could change your behavior. For some people this worked but for most there was no change in behavior since it required ongoing practice. Enterprise productivity initiatives through IT tend to perform even worse. Over the past 20 years businesses have been deploying enterprise productivity applications and services that are gen-erally poorly designed, boring, difficult to use and, unfortunately, don’t deliver any measurable improvements.

This is rapidly changing with the growing presence of smartphone and tablet apps in the enterprise. One of the greatest success factors behind iPhone and iPad (and most Apple products) is that the hardware and software is beautiful and easy to use. Thanks to Apple’s slick user interface (UI) and strict quality assurance requirements both consumer and enterprise apps have vastly improved and become more fun to use.

In this white paper we will give you 6 quick wins for Enterprise Mobility, so that your company can stay in control, drive adoption and generate real improvement within the organization.


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Don’t reinvent the wheel or spend months on RFPs if there are tools and services that can fulfill your needs out-of-the-box. There are over 900,000 apps in both Apple’s Appstore and Google Play; Apple alone offers 62,659 business apps.

Here are just a few examples of single function apps that can be implemented today:•Businesscardscanner: Using your mobile or tablet to scan

all business cards, such as Evernote Hello and LinkedIn’s CardMunch, makes your contacts easily searchable and accessible from your e-mail, as well as easily imported and shared to CRM platform and colleagues.

•Photosofwhiteboardswithnotes:Today, note taking for meetings can range from actual diagrams, whiteboards, or post-its on a wall. The easiest way to capture this valuable information for later is with your devices’ camera. There

are 23,166 camera apps in the Appstore to help with this! •Videorecordings: There are lots of great apps, like Splice

and Viddy, to capture, trim, edit and change the audio for video if you want to record and share a presentation by one of your colleagues or at a conference.

•Cloudstorage&documentrepository: Probably one of the most commonly used 3rd party services today without approval from internal IT is cloud storage to share documents between teams and with clients. Why is this? It’s because almost every 3rd party tool, such as Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, beats internal document storage services.

•Expense reports: One of the most boring and time consuming task for business travelers is expense reporting. Fortunately there are already mobile tools, such as Expensify and The Lemon, out there that allow you to speed up the process as long as your company is flexible enough to manage digital expense reports.


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Salesforce.com was by no means the first CRM tool or even the first web based CRM tool, but it was one of the first that looked beautiful and that was easy to use. Newer apps and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools are reaping the benefit of high adoption and usage by focusing on ease of use.

Your employees are used to playing with great looking consumer apps on their smartphone or tablet, so why

should business apps be any different? Make sure you invest time in a great design, prototyping and user testing before you start building any app. The apps adoption rate and ROI will depend on it. In fact, a survey conducted by research firm IDC shows that adoption of enterprise social tools would improve employee and business partner collaboration by 86%.


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With employees bringing their own devices to work and filling apps with corporate content it’s more difficult to impose strict rules on the use of 3rd party services in the offices. This doesn’t mean that you should allow total app anarchy; in fact only 22% of enterprises completely block non-sanctioned applications, however, in a survey from Symantec, 73% of employees say they access sensitive corporate data on their smartphones. This being said, our recommendation is:

1. Agree on a set of apps/tools to be used2. Create a place (preferably a mobile site) where all approved

and recommended tools can be found3. Clearly communicate usage and password policies. Re-

search from Kensington states that 70 million smartphones are a lost per year. A protocol for what happens when

employees leave must also be planned as a Ponemon In-stitude/Symantec study shows that 67% former employees admitted to using their company’s sensitive information after leaving.

4. Provide rules and guidelines to ensure that all data storage is consolidated to a few locations including documents, videos, photos, contacts, e-mail and more. Data storage software firm EVault’s survey reports 53% of organizations experienced a data loss in 2012.

5. Continuously enhance and update over time.

Most tools have a free version which can fulfill the user needs but make sure that the department heads secure a budget to upgrade to the premium versions if there is a clear business case and positive ROI.


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The best new tools are not likely to be found by the IT or procurement department, but your own employees. That being said, it is important to have an open forum and feedback channel where employees can suggest new tools and best practices. This will make your employees feel involved, responsible and engaged – also much more likely to adopt and use the chosen apps and tools.

Lastly, ensure that you have a plan to incorporate some of the proposed apps and tools in the guidelines so that the feedback doesn’t become a black hole. You can take the feedback from employees and use the information to create a selection of apps for the workers.

Apple supports in-house app development and distribution catalogs to fit specific businesses’ needs. Google Apps also offers App Catalog, a mobile app and device man-agement service. According to Aternity, 70% of businesses have plans for a corporate store of mobile applications.

British Petroleum (BP), one of the world’s leading oil and gas companies, did just this. After surveying their staff, a special board was formed to audit the requested apps. At the completion of the process, more than 70 apps were selected to be added to an enterprise appstore.


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This is probably one of the most challenging parts be-cause measuring productivity increases and ROI is always difficult. On the bright side, according to an study by [x]Cube labs 53% of enterprises says that an immediate benefit of mobility is either operational and cost efficiency or an increase in productivity and sales. A way to tackle measurement is to provide a simple business template for new tools that are being tested and measure the actual results versus the business case on a small scale. Below are critical questions to answer in measuring rewards:

Cost savings: •How much time does the tool save me per day, per week

and per month? What does this amount to in cost savings?

Incremental revenue:•What new things does the tool allow me to do that I wasn’t

capable of before? What is the financial gain of this?

Remember that not all productivity gains are measurable or something you can measure across the entire organ-ization. For example, if employees can get work done on their commute to the office then this could mean a substantial productivity gain but this has to be voluntary, not something you can require employees to do.


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The challenge of working with various single service apps and tools in isolation is:• It becomes difficult to achieve economy of scale•The organization will become fragmented•Data may not be as secure•No one will know what to do when an employee leaves or

changes role.

Over time you might want to evaluate how the tools can be consolidated into one simpler experience to make an even bigger impact for the organization. A CIO survey on enterprise mobility, performed by CRC, shows that 70% of organizations are planning to or already have implemented custom mobile apps. There are several great solutions, such as Golden Gekko’s Meetr, with flexible functionality that you can:•Get started quickly with minimum integration including

work flows, scheduling, document repository, data capture, internal communication and more.

•Customize the solution with business specific features and integrations to ensure you can improve ROI and keep up with innovation.

In many cases there is not one product that will fit your needs out-of-the-box so you have to build or adapt your own solution. If that is the case you can still achieve quick wins by choosing a solution that has the flexibility plug-in with 3rd party services via APIs. Alternatively, you can find an external supplier with experience of planning, developing, and deploying mobile enterprise solutions to consolidate the services and great user experience you need into one customized enterprise app.


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We transform existing businesses and help create new industry leaders in the mobile space through our experience, technology innovation, UX design and reliable quality solutions.

Meetr, built by Golden Gekko, is the next generation of enterprise mobile productivity solutions, supporting robust backend integration, intuitive Design/UX, enterprise greade security as well as flexible configuration and deployment. This being said, we understand each organization has unique requirements and built Meetr with the following flexibility:•Configure branding, app copy & more•Integrate with internal tools•Enable or disable individual features •Add custom features

Our services include service concept design, UX/UI design, native app, HTML5, mobile web and backend development, quality assurance and distribution. With 1500+ projects delivered and 150+ clients we provide solutions for telecom, retail, CPG, media, enterprise, government, healthcare/pharma, transportation and travel.


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•148apps.biz: http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/?mpage=appcount •Techinasia.com: http://www.techinasia.com/survey-adoption-enterprise-social-tools-asia-pacific-infographic/•[x]Cube Labs: http://visual.ly/enterprise-mobility•Symantec: http://s.zoomerang.com/sr.aspx?sm=cU9SnA70hh2xCaFTZuzG3qBISfREK7WbLiAR2753%2bpw%3d key findings:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/survey-results-consumerization-it-end-user-s-perspective-2•Kensington: http://tabtimes.com/news/ittech-stats-research/2012/02/10/security-firm-reveals-damage-lost-stolen-laptops-smart-

phones http://www.kensington.com/kensington/us/us/n/1557/760/kensington%C2%AE-extends-its-leadership-in-securi-ty-to-smartphones%3B-innovative-bungeeair-keeps-phones-and-content-secure.aspx

•Ponemon Institute/Symantec: http://infosightinc.com/blog/?p=50 http://www.ponemon.org/local/upload/file/2011_US_CODB_FINAL_5.pdf

•Evault: http://www.evault.com/about/articles-and-news/press/pr_2013_01_22.html•MGI Research MEAP: http://www.mgiresearch.com/Mobile-Computing/mobile-enterprise-application-platforms-meaps-a-buy-

ers-guide.html•Aternity: http://pinterest.com/pin/168110998561111113/•CIO Research Company: http://cioresearchcenter.com/2011/11/cio-survey-on-enterprise-mobility-survey-report/