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!
∞
Tags: Enterprise Mobility, Jim Hemmer, Mobile Apps, Mobile Innovation, Mobile Machinations, Mobile Transformation
