"The era of the PC has ended. Employees are becoming more mobile and looking for ways to still be connected wherever work needs to be done," said Phil Redman, research vice president at Gartner. "The convenience and productivity gains that mobile devices bring are too tempting for most companies and their employees.”

Patrick Bulacz Q&A

What are the primary business drivers for mobile among Australian companies that you work with?

Without a doubt, the top business driver for Australian companies is improving the productivity and efficiency of sales reps - enabling field employees to do more calls, more visits, more surveys. The benefit of this for other functions is greater customer visibility and access to better information about customer behaviours. To a lesser extent, companies are also using mobile to capture feedback on marketing campaigns. Notably, organisations in the pharmaceutical space are looking at ways to use mobile apps to track doctors’ responses to marketing collateral live in the field. Local FMCG enterprises are beginning to move in the same direction.

Progressive companies are also starting to use mobile to increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and to help reps better engage with their customers. For example, a leading liquor producer and marketer we work with is using mobile to enable its reps to more impactfully demonstrate product lines and highlight promotions while on the road. This enhances the quality of conversations reps have with their customers during the selling process. In addition, mobile enables the reps to preview new products and gauge interest from distributors and the hotels and bars that sell its liquors throughout the R&D cycle, which gives the company a competitive advantage in bringing products to market. 

What are the biggest challenges Australian companies typically face in building mobile enterprise apps?

There are two major challenges for local companies: the first, is developing a holistic mobile strategy across functions; the second, is a lack of mobile developer talent in the market. On the first point, mobile is still largely a buzzword for much of the enterprise market locally. Many organisations haven’t yet made a definitive call on BYOD, for example, and a lot of CIOs are still equating a mobile strategy with building an app. So there typically isn’t enough planning around mobile, certainly involving engagement across functions. This is partly why the limited mobile developer talent available in the market is choosing to work on start-up consumer apps, rather than for large and medium enterprises. 

How should companies engage with their employees to develop useful apps and mobile strategies for the long term?

Mobile projects in Australian companies are seldomly centrally driven by IT - they are normally driven from the user level within individual functions. For example, the retail division of a large media organisation we’re working with is using mobile to track sales trends and provide metrics to their clients on how other stores are performing in real time. Even their mature and somewhat conservative sales reps knew that mobile devices would help them sell more effectively than the paper-based tools they used previously, so the division incubated and financed the mobile initiative to make it happen.

In reality, the most innovative mobile use cases are typically driven by Sales or Marketing wanting to capture better customer insights or metrics. IT is often viewed as a roadblock to projects and left out of the loop. As a result, mobile initiatives tend to be siloed and not to integrate with core business platforms, so business value can’t be realised across functions.  

The challenge for IT is to become more proactive in developing holistic mobile strategies and responding to what users want to do their jobs better. A mobile version of a CRM, for example, is not a mobile strategy. IT needs to speak less to technology and more to how mobile can help employees do their jobs better. IT also needs to evolve from traditional “waterfall” project management approaches to instead move at the speed of mobile development, which is agile, iterative, and obsessed with the user experience. 

Bluewolf’s 5 tips for developing an enterprise mobile strategy are: start with an educated direction; lead with the right use case; design is everything; build early, build often; and deployment is harder than you think (read Jesse’s blog for more detail on these tips).

Can you share how these tips apply to mobile projects in Australia?

Starting with an educated direction is the most important step. You don’t go to a car lot and buy a car on the first day - you do the research and determine some baseline criteria beforehand. In the case of mobile, determine key factors like whether the use of devices will be driven centrally or by BYOD. From there, you can build the right use case for your business, bearing in mind that you don’t need to mobilise every task, especially for workers who are largely desk-based, like Finance. 

Design is everything - and remember that UI (user interface) is not UX (user experience). The critical consideration for UX is how users interact with their devices and whether they understand how everything works as soon as they open an app. If they need someone to sit beside them to train them, then the app is not intuitive enough. Equally, the app must integrate seamlessly with core business platforms, like Salesforce CRM. 

Deployment is not easy, but the good news is that If you have a holistic mobile strategy, it is much easier. Collaboration is also critical. The key to success for a mobile implementation is stakeholder engagement across all functions.

For more information on how to get your sales team mobile, request our free guide: The Changing Role of Sales.