I have a pop quiz for you:

• Q1: What is the Proteus Chip?
• Answer: You’ll have to wait to find out…(but no, it isn’t a snack that Robbie the Robot cooks up in Forbidden Planet)
• Q2: We know that smartphone adoption continues to be huge. In fact, in 2011 we expect total smartphone sales to surpass total laptop sales for the first time, a trend that will continue forward and never look back (eventually leaving laptops completely in the dust). We also know that where smartphones haven’t been adopted, feature phones have – with billions of them now in the hands of huge populations in third world/emerging countries – which have adopted and delivered wireless networks in enormous numbers. Wireless access and connectivity is now a given, even at the farther reaches of emerging countries. Given this information, what then is the one key word here that summarizes the advantages of all this mobile device proliferation?
• Answer: Access

Access to the wireless network. Access to industry. Access to data. Access to people. These capabilities have become pervasive enough and easy enough that mobility is now a true dominant technological force.

That begs the question: How can – or more accurately, how will – this mobile technology tour de force impact the future of Life Sciences and the Pharmaceutical industry?

Wireless Access and Mobile Applications

Mobility now provides users – regardless of whether they are advanced smart phone users in established countries or new users who now finally have true and sophisticated Internet/Web access in emerging countries – with a new and wide array of capabilities right at their fingertips. Easy access to wireless networks and the mobile Web, however, only takes a user and an enterprise to the floodgates of opportunity and possibilities. What’s missing that will turn the locks and open those floodgates?

Mobile applications.

There is very little point in having one (easy mobile access) without the other (mobile applications).

Easy mobile access plus mobile applications allow for much more functional capability in the field. This is generally true across the board, but it will lead to a significant competitive advantage in the case of extremely competitive professions such as Life Sciences and pharmaceuticals. These devices will give reach to amazing numbers of new consumers.

Even more important, we need to take into account consideration that Life Sciences is a highly regulated industry and that regulatory compliance is both strict and required in order to do business. This regulatory environment makes an already challenging industry a much more difficult one within which to do business. I spoke at length in a previous post focusing on regulatory compliance about how mobility eases the regulatory pain for any company in this industry.

So, for Life Sciences and pharma, the requirements to successfully execute on business growth requires easy wireless access, the ability to meet all regulatory compliance issues, and the ability to create and deliver mobile applications out to the field.

 Where will pharma see the greatest business opportunities? For the Life Sciences workforce, this explosion is occurring in the developing regions of the world, and is being driven by both smartphones and tablets. Sure, mobile driven competitive advantages accrue in the established countries as well, but in established countries it is a matter of developing superior business processes that provide a competitive advantage.

This is certainly true of businesses in third world countries, but what makes the concept of expanding pharma’s borders truly compelling is the sheer size of raw new opportunities that are now emerging. In the third world, the pharma industry has a unique opportunity to tap into entirely new streams of revenue that simply didn’t exist before. It becomes a matter of using mobility not only to greatly expand borders, but to pull off business land grabs of major proportions.

Cost and Safety

The reasons for this are many, but two of the big drivers are cost and safety. There are still many regions in the world where a laptop is viewed as an expensive business or personal tool. Smartphones, on the other hand, are relatively inexpensive by comparison and allow for use at any time. Whereas as just a few short years ago even relatively sophisticated third world hospitals, doctors and medical clinics lacked laptops, and Internet/Web access, today the vast majority of them have full wireless access through sophisticated mobile devices – iPads and smartphones. Users outside of the pure business environment – such as patients, for example – also have access through feature phones.

The flip side of the cost coin also involves the cost of safely doing business. A client of mine in the Asia-Pacific region comes to mind here as an example. This client is particularly sensitive to the safety needs of its employees, and this safety issue is a key factor in the company heavily adopting smart phones and mobile apps. Mobile devices now allows individual to do most, if not all of their job remotely.

As a result many companies are making the shift to provide only smart phones and tablets to their field forces, eliminating the highly visible laptop which can make them a very real target for theft or violence. The key to success here is the raw power now available in these mobile devices – they easily challenge laptops in sophistication and capability.

Mobile Apps : The True Keys to Mobile Opportunity

Mobile applications built specifically to meet the deep demands created by a regulatory environment, and that are able to easily take advantage of all of today’s mobile devices – especially Blackberries, iPhones, iPads and Android-based hardware, are the keys that unlock the floodgates of opportunity.

Pharma sales forces have now begun mobile adoption in earnest, and those companies that get there first, with the best mobile apps, will get to participate in the land grab. Even as the size of the potential land grab becomes evident, pharma has reduced its sales forces the world over. At the same time the regulatory requirements have grown ever more onerous (and yes, they are necessary).

As I noted earlier, capturing business processes and insuring regulatory compliance are the central themes to building any mobile application. Imagine targeting the appropriate materials to the various regions of the world, automatically tracking what version of information or advertizing was sent, and dynamically recording feedback. This loop provides a company with a lot of power when it is done via handheld. It also allows for compliance and reduces the possible failures of recording that are common.

Mobility will enable health workers today to directly order medications and access inventories which can greatly reduce the time to get medicines in the hands of those that need them. Mobile applications will also bring the consumers – especially third world consumers – closer to their pharma providers. There is tremendous value in this – and we can easily extrapolate from the US market: look at pharmacy providers such as Medco and Express Scripts. From a consumer perspective, ease of ordering, prescription tracking, and drug interaction notification are all beneficial services. Just the simple speeding up of the ordering/supply process in the third world can affect an entire population profoundly.

Lives (Real Lives) are at Stake

But the land grab for medications in the third world also involves the need to insure that hospitals, doctors and patients all know about the medications that are becoming available. How can mobility impact sales from this perspective? Through consumer-facing mobile applications pharma vendors can provide a means to advertise directly to the public. This accomplishes two key things: mobile apps can and will bring the client closer to the drug providers and their products. Just as important, the industry will be able to pull together field usage data and information that has never been available to the pharma industry before – especially in the case of third world countries.

The ability for mobile devices and applications to gather point-of-presence field data and get it to a valuable endpoint quickly is nothing short of a quantum technology leap. More and more medical devices now provide interfaces that mobile devices can use to collect data from. If a patient opts in, information can be gathered that allows researchers or practitioners to tailor the care of that individual as well as build future models for care. This dynamic accumulation of data is an amazing enabler.

Think, for example, of a poorly controlled diabetic patient. With this dynamic mobile-based data collection and mobile control of, say, an insulin pump, a medical practitioner will help control the diabetes directly by regulating the actual use of insulin. The benefits of this are far reaching as it helps to manage disease and reduce the other issues that are side effects of poor disease control.

The promise that this brings in the forms of disease management and dosage regulation for all medications is enormous. There are companies out there today that have invented all forms of dermal patches that can monitor various body functions and notify a mobile device. The monitoring of the body in this case is facilitated by ingestible chips that send notifications to the skin patch. I know, it sounds far-fetched but it is today’s mobile reality.

While all of this is really exciting, particularly to the techies out there and for the business stakeholders who will have the primary responsibility for expanding pharma’s borders, the most dramatic effect of all of this will be healthier people at a true global level. And that is a very good thing indeed.

∞

Several of my fellow bloggers have recently focused some of their posts on the importance of mobile strategies, and what needs to be considered in developing them. I’ve been inspired by these! And since I happen to have my own variation on this crucial theme, I thought I’d share. It would be unfriendly of me otherwise.

Imagine, if you will, that your CEO has asked you to develop you company’s mobility strategy. Seems like a big deal doesn’t it? The CEO wants you to determine the course of mobility and plot that course for your organization. What could be a better gig than that? Maybe some help with what you just got signed up for would be appropriate.

Having a mobility strategy starts with the basics. What do we do now? How are we doing it? What is working and what needs to change? How much change can our organization consume at any given time? What are the internal and external influences that should be considered in planning my strategy? Who are my stakeholders? What are the long term and short term goals for the company? Can I align my strategy with these goals? Can I facilitate the change necessary to support these goals as they relate to our mobile efforts? Can I please shut up because I’m giving myself a migraine? I can (and often do) go on forever.

The situation is fairly simple. You need a strategy but just a strategy is not enough to be successful. You need to execute on that strategy and measure the results regularly and effectively. You then have to adapt your plans to address your changing business needs. And you must do all of this quickly, cheaply and effectively or you’re fired. No pressure. Can you have something on my desk by Monday?

A Mission Statement? That Ain’t a Strategy!

Again, I am taking a rather extreme approach to this question but that’s the way I roll. I have interacted with quite a few companies that have a ‘strategy’ that sounds more like a vague mission statement. ‘We will mobilize our workforce using cutting edge technology to become the industry leader’ has always been my favorite. Like listening to a politician, I heard a lot of words but the message was cloudy. How does one go about executing on that (alleged) strategy? Here’s another thing: strategies are great but they are only the beginning.

The true measure of your strategy is if it can be implemented, and that is no small feat. Think of all the times you have been asked to help solve a problem. You come up with a plan and then what? Does anybody follow it? Do you adapt as your plan goes into place since it will inevitably have an unforeseen impact that will have to be compensated for? Do you measure your plan once implemented? Can you honestly say you made things better or did you just make things different?

Here’s an example of how this ‘strategy only’ process works in all the wrong ways. A customer had a problem getting accurate data back from the field. They had a paper based system and aside from the techs not mailing the paperwork back regularly enough, when it was received it was usually unreadable (think ‘dog ate my homework’). The strategy they put in place was to ‘improve the flow of paperwork to and from the field.’ An honorable goal to say the least but not exactly a strategy. They deployed mobile fax machines with all the techs and started reaping the rewards the very next day.

Since no good deed goes unpunished they were in for a real shock. Sure paperwork was whizzing through the ether and getting places faster but it wasn’t any better. I have said this too many times to count, if I mobilize your current crappy process it will just be a FASTER crappy process. And that makes who happy exactly?

The challenge this ‘strategy’ presented was that there was no ‘and then’ to it. They put the fax machines out in the vehicles and then…nothing. That was the whole enchilada (without rice and beans). I take exception with this approach being called a strategy in the first place. This could more accurately be described as a tactic and it did what it was supposed to do. It got the paperwork flowing more quickly. But the paperwork was still unreadable, incomplete, inaccurate and a series of other un’s and in’s. The problem only became more glaring.

First Review, Then Plan

The correct approach might have been to review their current processes and figure out what was working and what they could improve on. Just getting the bad paperwork to move faster was probably pretty low on the employees list of concerns but it happened anyway and with gusto. The real shame in this situation was that both the office and field folks needed real help and this was a missed opportunity. It didn’t help and in some cases it made it worse.

A wise man once told me that no battle plans survives first contact with the enemy intact. This would have been a good lesson for the strategy team. Don’t fix the symptom. Identify the root cause and attempt to fix that but be aware that you will only be playing kick the can. As you fix the first problem the next most pressing issue will now take its place. Ever hear someone say ‘I found my car keys… They were in the last place I looked…’ No kidding? Really? Why would you keep looking once you found them? I’ll wait for you to fill in your own answer but if they hadn’t looked the keys would still be lost. Don’t treat opportunities like your car keys, it’s just not right.

You will see opportunity for improvement anywhere you look in your business. The right Mobility Strategy is to adapt your business as your challenges adapt but never forget to keep looking. You may find that you have made things different and not better so it’s time to adapt that plan and rush out into battle again. The enemy doesn’t stand a chance now.

∞

It’s been an interesting week for Dell – from having a decent fiscal 2010 Q3 financially to re-thinking its mobile strategies. The two are related I think, and the financial numbers tell the reason why. I’ll get back to those in a bit, but first let’s take a look at ‘Dell Mobility.’

Dell began its ‘formal’ mobile business last year, but it really began back in 2007, as a pure consumer play. Originally Dell needed to better compete with HP for the home PC market, and it all began there. But mobility was always part of the underlying game plan.

Now here is the important thing – I take Dell’s new move to integrate its mobile products into its other business groups as a sure sign that Dell now understands that mobility is slowly maturing within the enterprise (not from a business perspective – that is still in its infancy, but from a technology perspective), and that the enterprise is going to be where Dell pulls off the mobile win.

Dell is absolutely on the right track with this mobile strategy. Why?

Observations of What Theories Predict

I have a mobile enterprise theory (what will be one of my upcoming top 2011 mobile trends) that permeates Mobile Observatory – it comes together around the notion that the consumerization of the enterprise is giving way to a much more normal order of things – the enterprization of consumer technology. I’ve written various blog posts that elaborate on my theory – for example, Good Heavens, It’s Raining iPads, and my musings on what and why Microsoft needs to focus on the enterprise (in which I strongly suggest that Microsoft and Dell need a very close mobile enterprise collaboration).

Dell’s new push is predicted by my theory. A scientist (especially a particle scientist playing with the Large Hadron Collider and looking for the Higgs Boson) will say that experiments that allow observations in the real world of those things predicted by a given theory are a necessary component to proving the efficacy of that theory – I believe Dell provides that real world observation of my mobile theory that it is enterprization, not consumerization, that will drive mobility forward. Those scientists also require independently reproduced experiments and observations. Along those lines I’m confident we’ll see more such observations in 2011 (and technically, I believe that HP can already be counted here, given where it is going with WebOS, and why).

When Dell began its consumer/mobile push, Android was still in the box and the iPhone was a rumor about to become a reality. Dell understood that there was a significant consumer technology movement afoot, and the company brought in Ron Garriques, who had been the innovation guru behind Motorola’s RAZR and mobile strategies, to make that consumer innovation happen.

It isn’t hard to associate Garriques leaving Motorola with Motorola’s fall from grace shortly thereafter, though it’s murky as to what blueprints Garriques left behind to follow up on the RAZR. I’m pretty sure the plans called for more than blue, red and green RAZRs, but Motorola suddenly found itself rudderless on the innovation front as the iPhone hit the stage, though it is certainly regaining its innovation mojo through all things Droid. Garriques obviously knew that world, and it made sense for Dell to bring him on board.

So, the point of that brief review of history is that Dell correctly assessed that innovation and consumer markets go hand in hand, hence the innovative Garriques’ entrance into Dell. OK, now let’s fast forward to today.

A Window Closes – A Window Opens

One view of things, which isn’t very important, is that Dell took too long to go mobile and that it has seen its window of opportunity for selling mobile devices to consumers close. But let’s not dwell on that (it’s not important!). And let’s not dwell either on how Dell went about the initial launch of its Venue Pro with Microsoft (it went badly, but that’s neither here nor there). 

The other view, which is the very important one, is that Dell sees an entirely brand new window of mobile opportunity opening to sell mobility deep into the enterprise and the public sector (government, hospitals, etc). And of course Dell’s consumer group continues to exist – but whatever mobile revenue is derived from the consumer side will now become incremental bonus mobile revenue, rather than the only mobile revenue.

Now, let’s return to the Dell revenue numbers that were just reported.

The Revenue Numbers Tell the Story

81% of Dell’s revenue comes from selling hardware (PCs, servers, data storage etc.) to enterprises and the public sector (e.g. government, life sciences, eduation). At the end of the day less than 20% of Dell’s revenue comes from the consumer side. Now, let’s look at how that revenue distribution is growing year over year.

Commercial sales grew 24 % (to $12.4 billion). Consumer sales rose a mere 4% (to $3 billion). Breaking out the commercial sales a bit deeper, large business revenue grew 27%, SMB revenue grew 24%, and public sector revenue grew 20%. Whew! It doesn’t take a particle scientist to figure out where the money is…

Those numbers make exceedingly clear why Dell’s mobile group is being disbanded and re-orged. Let me paraphrase Dell (the words in brackets are mine):

‘Phones and other mobile devices have grown to be more than a consumer-focused initiative [enterprization!]. Folding these products into Dell’s business units [enterprization!] will better position the company to sell mobile devices to all of its customers.’

In other words, Dell is re-orging its mobile assets so as not to limit sales to consumers, but to significantly strengthen its ability to sell into its core public sector and enterprise customer base. This is the smart move to make. Dell sees the ‘enterprization of mobility’ happening along the same exact lines as my theory. I assume that Dell’s management is ‘imagining’ – as I am – all sorts of ways to bundle mobility with its entire range of enterprise and public sector products. It will help drive mobility as the long term strategy I preach.

Is it really that easy? Hmm…Dell needs a few more things to add to the mix. Enterprises are going to require enterprise-grade applications to begin with (see my blog posts on long term mobile planning as to why), and I believe Dell needs to place not merely a strong but a huge emphasis on delivering the right mobile application development platform (which I know is already taking place).

I’ll be keeping a close eye on things here. For now, GREAT move Dell!

∞

I remember way back when I was young and a friend was dating a person who, to be kind about it, ‘had issues.’ We all warned him that this young lady was trouble but he was smitten. Years later, after they had broken up, my friend admitted that we were probably right and she did have ‘issues.’ Since I didn’t have the decency to leave him alone with that statement (and always being the one who pokes people with a stick) I replied, ‘Heck man. That poor girl had more baggage than an American Tourister store.’ He snorted his drink and it wasn’t pretty.

I tell you this story for two reason. The first being that I am almost always right, and the second being we all have baggage that we carry with us. Some of us have a simple carry-on bag while others require a Sherpa and a yak team for assistance. No matter how you slice it though, the luggage is still there.

The same can be said in business. We often carry our baggage with us from job to job and even more so when we are changing positions within the same company. We paid good money for that baggage in blood sweat and tears and we’re just not going to send it to Goodwill without a fight. The fact that it may be blinding us and making us closed to new ideas and approaches seems to be something that came with the luggage as an added bonus.

I worked for a wireless phone company in a past life. It doesn’t matter which one, it’s like the DMV. You get the point. We had some young guns and some old codgers working there and for the most part we all got along as well as phone company employees could. We had our territorial disputes and departmental quarrels but since the vast majority of us were customer focused it kept our eyes on what was important. There were of course those odd occasions when things went terribly wrong.

Being the early days of wireless we had little competition. Many of our senior managers had come from the landline side of the business, which peppered our leadership with people who had spent entire careers with a carrier in a virtual monopoly in their respective markets. If you didn’t like how Landline Company A was treating you in those days your choice was to either resort to smoke signals for communications or just take the abuse and pay your bill. But wireless was a different world. Judge Green (you don’t remember Judge Green? That’s what the Internet and Wikipedia are for) had made sure to fix that problem with his divestiture decree and we had, at a minimum, a duopoly (that means 2 choices for those of you not familiar with the term). Now if you didn’t like Wireless Carrier A you could go to Wireless Carrier B. Not much choice but it was still a choice. But this concept didn’t sit well with some folks and others just plain ignored it.

Change? What’s There to Like About Change?!

We had a manager that worked in our Engineering department that had been with the company since Alexander Graham Bell was a boy (I’m only slightly exaggerating on this one, trust me). Before joining the company he had spent a prior career in the military. To say he was set in his ways would be an insult to the curmudgeons of the world. Anyway, this guy, we’ll call him Mr. Curmudgeon to simplify things, did not like change and was not afraid to voice his opinion about it. There was no way anybody was going to tell him to do anything different regardless of the reasoning or consequences.

We required fundamental business changes to prepare for the upcoming introduction of at least two more competitors in our market. We needed to make sure we had the best network performance available so our customers would have no reason to leave headed for one of the new upstarts. The problem was that Mr. Curmudgeon was a member of the Network Engineering staff and his assessment of how the network performed was the only opinion he chose to listen to.

But here is the problem with that – you can’t be considered the best at anything if you are the only one who thinks you are. Without some kind of independent outside verification it can never be a true measure.

We are Not Always What we Believe

We had just been ranked highest in customer satisfaction by a well known survey firm for the third year in a row and some of us were pretty full of ourselves. During a strategy planning meeting one person actually bragged about how great we were and sited the survey results as his proof. Never at a loss for a sarcastic comment, I chimed in that it wasn’t so much that our customer’s loved us, they just hated our lone competitor more. The room was eerily silent. Was it something I said?

What followed was a prolonged discussion about how we could stay in that enviable #1 position going forward. We knew from verbatim statements captured from survey participants that they were generally happy but there were serious concerns about coverage and call quality in four specific geographic areas. This was a simple problem to fix since it had been verified by literally hundreds of survey respondents who could only be considered unbiased observers. Research results from an army of testers and we didn’t pay a dime for any of it. How cool is that? This was however taken by one individual in the room as a personal insult. I bet you can’t guess who?

Mr. Curmudgeon blurted out that according to his network statistics, these customers were wrong. All of them. Uh, ok? Obviously they had an axe to grind. They rated us better than our competition, provided valuable feedback about where we were doing well and where we could improve and they were all wrong? Which part were they wrong about? If we assume they are too stupid to assess the areas where we need improvement it only stands to reason that we should wholly dismiss their positive feedback as well. Fair is fair.

Mr. Curmudgeon was guilty of carrying his own baggage into the room on a furniture dolly. You could not call his baby ugly and by stating that we had some areas to improve on our customers were calling Mr. Curmudgeon’s network (AKA his baby) ugly. How dare they!

How many times do we collect input (good or bad) with a wary eye? Do we first consider who is communicating the information to us and use that as our frame of reference for whether we accept it or not? Do we simply dismiss things we don’t want to hear because these thoughts don’t agree with our view? Is your baby so ugly it should be called a monkey and given a banana? How will you know if you don’t leave your baggage at the door? It may be easier said than done but it is a must for any successful business. Not to mention your mobile projects!

Don’t be like Mr. Curmudgeon. Life is way too short to take everything so personally.

∞

It’s the Mobile Gourmet’s favorite holiday – Thanksgiving!

A day of food, food…and more food! I’m so excited I can’t decide what kind of turkey to make this year. The past few years I’ve ordered a turducken (that’s a chicken inside a duck inside a turkey in case you’re wondering – highly recommended to try at least once), roasted a tasty heritage turkey (again a must try despite the high cost per pound), and cooked a fat goose just for a change of pace. Of course, leading up to the turkey dinner with all the fixins is a lot of hard work and skillful coordination – especially when you have a small New York City kitchen (no double wall ovens here!).

And let’s not forget about dealing with all the guests. Making sure they feel involved (‘Can I help?’) without slowing you down; keeping them happy, fed and entertained throughout the day. Some of these friends and family you may not have seen in years and even some that you may prefer not to see at all. Thanksgiving is truly a day where you use all your skills of project management, diplomacy, and conciliation. But when it’s all done, it’s well worth it to see all the happy faces.

There is no blueprint for ensuring a successful Thanksgiving Day, but fortunately for your mobile project there are a few valuable resources that you can turn to for help. One such key resource is from Antenna in the form of a whitepaper describing the Antenna Implementation Methodology (AIM™). Essentially AIM is an eight phase process born from over a decade;s worth of experience in working with large organizations implementing complex mobile solutions. It’s like someone who has hosted Thanksgiving Day dinners every weekend for the past dozen years and has put all that knowledge of the process into a simple guide.

This year I was determined to pull together and apply what I know about the mobile development process and what I know I need in order to pull off a successful bird day dinner - Jason’s Thanksgiving Day Methodology (What’s doubly great about it is that you can plan both Thanksgiving dinner and your next mobile project at the same time!) Here it is:

1. Project definition/scope: Determine what your menu/theme will be
2. Skills assessment and training: Make sure you have the right equipment and skill set to complete the menu (e.g. do you really know how to de-bone a turkey or have a big enough fryer?)
3. Requirements gathering: Plan the seating arrangements and address any special dietary requests
4. Design: Start shopping for ingredients and prepping
5. Build and integrate: Roast, season, bake, season, braise, season, fry, season, poach, season, boil, season, steam…you get the idea
6. Testing: Don’t forget to taste what you cook along the way
7. Controlled introduction: As the chef and host  you should definitely sneak in some snacking for you and your crew of helpers—otherwise you might not eat at all
8. Production rollout: Finally, let’s eat!

Happy Thanksgiving!

∞

A couple of days ago I revealed the existence of the 10 Mobile Commandments that Mobile Master Moses rendered unto us. I trust that you found the first “tablet” of Mobile Commandments enlightening. I am now prepared to reveal the second set of five commandments found on the second tablet.

6th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall guarantee end-to-end message delivery

In an occasionally connected mobile environment, guaranteed message delivery is not a foregone conclusion. You need an asynchronous messaging architecture that provides “fire and forget” transactions that allow users to not worry about wireless connectivity. More importantly, the platform should track all messages and transactions as they pass through the various touch points between the device and backend. In this manner, the flow of business-critical messages and transactions can be monitored for troubleshooting and audited for usage analysis.

7th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall centralize OTA management of users, apps and devices

Centralized, mobile management is a must-have capability. There should be role-based access for administrators and they in turn need to provide role-based access to apps by user group(s) and apply version control management over apps. App updates, incremental or whole, must be deployed easily and directly over-the-air to devices with minimal impact to users. The mobile management system should also integrate with LDAP/Active Directory for authentication and authorization.

8th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall capture and analyze detailed app usage

Powerful analytics is essential to the continuous improvement of the mobile app and to drive user satisfaction. The solution needs to track application usage in near real-time, by location, and at screen-by-screen or click-by-click level of detail. All the usage data can be reported on in a mobile management console, or it can be extracted to third party tools, such as Omniture, Tea Leaf or Google Analytics, for more in-depth analysis.

9th Commandment: Thou shall ensure scalability and redundancy for millions of users

Leveraging the Mobile Cloud can help you scale easier and faster to meet demands of users across your entire enterprise and customer base. The Mobile Cloud should easily accommodate spikes in usage at any moment—especially important for consumer apps where usage is more unpredictable than employee apps. Also, since frequent app downtime will inevitably lead to app abandonment, the Mobile Cloud should provide high availability of apps by providing load balancing and system redundancy.

10th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall secure the mobile deployment from end-to-end

Strong mobile security is critical to instilling user confidence, which will drive adoption and usage. Security needs to be inherently part of the mobility architecture, from advanced encryption to multi-factor authentication, depending on the complexity of the app. Security policy management should be centralized for administrators so that they can define the level of security by application, device type, user group or any combination thereof.  

So there you have it! The Ten Mobile Commandments:

10 simple rules (albeit underpinned by complex technology) to follow when developing your mobility strategies. You may be tempted by some vendors, or even by your internal IT folks, to bypass some of these commandments – but don’t be swayed!

Remember the proverb: ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ The goal must always be low TCO and high ROI. By following the Ten Mobile Commandments you will insure this and save yourself a lot of trouble down the line, such as the possibility of ending up with a ‘stranded app’ – which will absolutely result in heavy costs to redo or update.

Here’s another very interesting bit of info – I’ve been working hard to piece together the third ‘smashed tablet’ of commandments and it’s looking to me like Mobile Master Moses has another five mobile commandments targeting “What Not to Do.” Stay tuned!

∞

One of my favorite phrases these days is ‘Mobile is Transformative.’ And I say it with unabashed enthusiasm. There’s no doubt about it – today mobility changes the ballgame, literally for everyone – whether in the enterprise or the consumer market. To be transformative, mobile apps need to demonstrate ‘innovation’ – which more often than not is going to require thinking outside the box.
 
What do I mean? Take a look, for example, at Antenna customer ING Direct USA’s new ‘Flip for Fun’ mobile application. Very cool! It combines today’s hot mobile devices with mobile banking and today’s social networking capabilities – all of which ING Direct aptly summarizes as ‘a branch in your pocket.’ It’s a great example not only of mobile innovation but also of how mobility is delivering the transformative experience I talk about. (I’ve included a quick video at the end of this blog post that focuses a bit more on this.)
 
The things we deal with every day – hardware and software – are but small pieces of the innovation story. Sometimes we need to make out of the box innovation investments and experiments of a different nature – by tapping directly into the power of human innovation. Recently the Antenna team put in place just such an innovation experiment, by unwrapping what we refer to as the Antenna AppTank Institute  – a specific effort to take a deep dive into the use of mobility as seen through the eyes of college students who are both heavy mobile users as well as folks that are just now entering the workforce.
 
As it turns out, we’ve learned a number of very interesting things through our AppTank experiment. We brought in six AppTank interns – college students who fit our profile as described above, and who were also able to provide HTML and Javascript development skills, and relied on them to give us a glimpse into how young people think about and use mobility as part of what they do every day – whether at work or at play.

The ROI on our investment has been good and was well worth the effort – we’ve gained a good deal of new insight into building mobile apps that is valuable enough to us to deem it ‘proprietary to our business.’ And we’ve developed some very tangible new ideas for what we, as a company, need to bring to our professional mobile services teams who design and build our mobile applications. I’m already looking forward to our next AppTank session – the Class of 2011, which we’ll most likely put into place very early next summer.
 
I know what you are thinking at this point – is there anything I can actually reveal?
 
Sure – young people will be an unruly bunch – they don’t yet know what they don’t know – everything is possible, and nothing is impossible. But it is exactly this unruly perspective, when captured and applied to mobile possibilities – whether the scenario was one of their unbridled free thinking, or one of pondering on a business issue we specifically gave them to work on – which unlocks the innovation. We saw as well that unlocking innovation also greatly increases motivation. Keep in mind that we weren’t only looking at ideas for using mobile technology; we were also looking for how young people will be motivated to put that innovation to actual business use.

What else? Young people think in the moment – and this is precisely what mobility allows us to capture. Along those lines, think of real time social networking as it can apply to your business processes. It is critical to the young people that are now entering the workforce. And make sure that your mobile app plans include targeted testing through the eyes of your younger employees.

I’ll leave you with those thoughts – trust me, they are game changers – or rather, they’re transformative!

∞