By Saul Berman, IBM
Mobile networks and the devices that exploit them -- just as the Internet did in the 1990s -- are radically changing the way we interact with the world.
Everything from how we buy from merchants, how we educate our students or how we entertain ourselves is moving to mobile platforms with stunning speed. While the transformation of the consumer experience is well advanced, business has been slower to transform employees' experiences in the same ways. And, just as the Internet before, many businesses are profoundly underestimating the full and lasting impact of this still nascent revolution.
Recognizing this trend, last month Apple and IBM announced an exclusive partnership that teams the market-leading strengths of each company to transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps, by bringing IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities with enterprise level security to iPhone® and iPad® devices. The landmark partnership aims to redefine the way work will get done, address key industry mobility challenges and spark true mobile-led business change.
We see the evidence of the mobile transformation all around us. More than 10 times more smartphones and tablets are sold every day than babies are born. The average person checks their smartphone 150 times a day, or nearly once every six minutes. And the market for wearable devices is projected to grow at least fivefold over the next four years.
Mobile devices not only play an important role in our collective consumption of information, but they also generate a growing proportion of new information. There are more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being created each day, including countless uploads of video, images, geo-positioning information, and daily updates to social media that increasingly originate from mobile devices. The result: mobile data traffic is growing 80 percent per year.
Many businesses are already using sophisticated data analytics to distill insights and context from this increasing volume of digital information. They are increasingly using insights to understand the world around us, and change how people, businesses and governments interact.
Others are not. In IBM’s most recent C-suite study, 84 percent of CIOs rated mobile solutions as a critical investment to get closer to customers, while 94 percent of CMOs ranked mobile apps as crucial to their digital marketing plans. Yet most of the mobile applications they’re considering are customer facing, and that’s only half of the equation.
We believe it's time for organizations of all sizes, in all industries, to look beyond the crowds descending upon the consumer and consider the true transformational potential of mobile inside an organization. By combining the power of analytics with mobile computing, organizations have the opportunity to serve up rich data on location, within the proper context, based on user preferences and behaviors.
These "mobility" solutions will increasingly enable employees and organizations to quickly acquire new skills, work more and better together and make more informed decisions at the point of contact. Information platforms, tailored to each employee’s specific needs, can reconfigure workflows to get the right information (and only the right information) to the right people at the right time in the right place.
We call this the Individual Enterprise that is enabled by mobility and empowered by analytics. And we believe organizations that architect their business and information systems with this model will unleash the full potential of their employees, evolve their business models, or even create totally new ones, and thus realize the transformational benefits of mobility.
The potential for mobile to change the way we work is apparent. But its full value is only unlocked with analytics. Together, they will completely transform the way we work. There are four ways that organizations can become a mobile enterprise. They are:
1. Creating new business value: Faster response times of mobile computing will enable both individuals and their employers to make better decisions and improve customer experiences. They will be able to do more with less by increasing people efficiency and reducing wasted time on process. On-the-spot pricing decisions, for example, can lead to enhanced revenue and better profit margins. Just as mobile computing has changed most consumer-facing businesses, mobility enables completely new business models.
2. Powered by analytics: The value of analytics is amplified by mobile, not only by providing more precise information about time and place, but through its ability to break down large decisions into a series of smaller ones that can more accurately hone in on desired results. More precise inputs also boost confidence in the quality of analytic insight. And in-the-moment analytical intelligence creates real-time understanding that can improve responsiveness. In the end, every step of a business -- from product and service creation through to every customer touch point -- can take advantage of advanced analytical capabilities.
3. Designed first for mobile: Mobility redefines possible operating and engagement models, shifting the design of enterprise systems to focus on the experience of the end-user. Building apps with time, location, speed, temperature and ever more situational dimensions embedded and across the most appropriate form factors -- such as smart phones, tablets and wearables -- makes possible an anywhere, anytime environment. Mobility should not be an afterthought, but the starting point for the enterprise.
4. Unleashing empowered employees: This approach allows organizations to evolve from managing employees to creating ecosystems; from assigning "a person for the process" to creating "a process for the person." By reconfiguring workflows for an individual, mobile combined with analytics can empower employees to make on the spot and better decisions based upon their situational awareness. With the flexibility to create their own work experiences, employees are free to find better ways of getting things done.
Mobile and analytics. Two coinciding phenomena that together will change the way business gets done. The combination will enable employees to better collaborate and take advantage of the knowledge of the entire organization and the history of interactions, make better use of time and assets, and drive results faster.
Keep up with the latest on IBM Mobile news @IBMMobile.
Saul J. Berman, Ph.D., is a Partner and Chief Strategist in IBM Global Business Services.
