The importance of a mobile app

Mobile-friendly enterprise apps can be the secret weapon of any B2B organisation. Though plenty already exist, their universal creation and adoption are going to be key in 2015.

By We Think.

That is, if companies are not investing in mobile applications to increase productivity among their workforce (or making their own software products mobile-friendly), they are going to fall behind or, worse, become obsolete.

But why should we invest in mobile?

Well, according to a Harvard Business Review article, the average person interacts with their mobile device 150 times a day. And if that’s not enough to get your attention, by the end of this year, there will have been 5bn enterprise app downloads.

Joe Panepinto, vice president at Jack Morton Worldwide and author of the article writes that the value of apps in the workplace is in the control, consistency, creativity, and credibility that they foster. Not only do mobile apps allow you to streamline assets that are being used (in contrast to the “dumping ground” that is most companies’ intranets), they only require compatibility with two major mobile platforms (iOS and Android), making consistency much more feasible.

Moreover, mobile gives you the opportunity to integrate creative solutions using cutting edge technology (think cameras and GPS) and to gain the respect of the tech savvy recruits and employees at your company.

But how will we use the apps?

How won’t you use them? A whitepaper published by Jack Morton Worldwide, Apps@Work –The world of apps beyond Angry Birds and Words with Friends, highlights the use cases for mobile enterprise apps, calling out sales and learning specifically: “Learning sticks when it’s experienced in context, when it’s needed, and immediately applicable.”

All the more reason to leverage mobile apps to enable sales reps (for example) with the right content—both for informal learning and for sharing with prospects to close the sale. But the real key to the success of mobility is the productivity it enables. The same whitepaper sites a survey done by Mobile Helix, in which 50 per cent of enterprises surveyed said that if all enterprise apps were to go mobile, productivity would rise by 40 per cent. Because of this belief, 20 per cent plan to develop business intelligence or dashboard applications that can be leveraged by sales teams.