Milja's Mobile Musings

Everyone has a few favorite mobile apps. I’m not talking about games (thought I have few of those too), but the mobile apps that really make a difference in your personal and professional life. Apps that make your day just a little bit easier. For example, I love TripIt for its ability to automatically gather all the details about my travel plans. I’ll never miss a flight or go to the wrong hotel again. I also love my bank’s mobile app (built on Sybase 365 mBanking solution). The ability to pay a bill from my phone is an incredible convenience.

Personal apps aside, there are also some work apps that, though incredibly simple, make a big difference. I’ll share a few…

I was at the SAP office in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago and had the great opportunity to sit down with our Global IT team responsible for building internal apps for SAP. The IT apps team has a mission to “serve employees by listening and understanding, and by improving processes, methods and tools.” During the discussion of new mobile apps the team has rolled out, it struck me that the small, simple apps that can be very significant.

There are two very basic things that I have struggled with in the past year – one is dialing in to a conference call and needing to memorize ten digits to enter in my iphone, and the second is interpreting the complex acronyms we like to use on a daily basis.

It is sad, but I simply do not have the capacity to memorize a ten digit passcode required to get into a conference call. I can easily remember my 16 digit credit card, my childhood best friend’s phone number, and every phone number I have ever had – but when it comes to retaining numbers for roughly 30 seconds, seven is my limit. I even downloaded the book ‘Walking with Einstein’ to try to learn how to improve my memory for just this purpose. While the book was great, I found an even better way to solve my problem. Easy Connect.

This is a very simple mobile app that makes a big difference to me. It is integrated into my calendar and automatically dials the conference call number and enters the code for me. Certainly not rocket science, but takes something that has always caused me grief (especially while driving) and does that little bit to make my life easier. It eliminates the need for me to pull off the road into some stranger’s parking lot just to dial a phone number. Thank you IT.

The next little app that makes a big difference is our internal ‘acronym decoder’. Anyone who works at (or with) SAP knows that we love acronyms. For example, our MEAP and MDM/EMM solutions can be leveraged by the MIC and the MDC to build apps leveraging BYOD and COPE for IT. Seriously. Painful. Our IT team has built an app that allows you to simply enter those three little letters and enjoy “a-ha” moments that help you actually follow conversations.

I have enjoyed reading great articles recently about ‘crapplications’ and ‘lacklications’ from some of my industry peers. These great articles talk about apps that either try to do too much or don’t do enough – and consquently don’t do anything very well. The thing that I value about my favourite apps built by IT are that they are what ‘Mobility for All’ is all about. A mobile strategy doesn’t have to mean building only complicated, data rich, in-depth, ROI generating apps. It is about making people more productive in every way possible.

I encourage you to explore quick wins that get people excited about mobile, and include them in your product development plans.

The Consumer Electronics Show was held in Las Vegas this week, bringing together over 100,000 techies to ogle over the latest innovations. The hilights of the show include cool new connected devices including Ultrabooks, connected vehicles, TVs you can control from your iPad and yet another new form factor from Samsung called the ‘Note’. While there is a lot of excitement around the hardware, it is the application of this consumer technology in enterprise that I find more interesting.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week with SAP’s CIO Oliver Bussmann, talking about our predictions for what 2012 will bring (stay tuned for more on that topic). A good portion of these predictions center around how consumer technology will impact businesses around the world. The last two years have been significant – and it’s not going to slow down. There isn’t anything new to this story, but the adoption rates of consumer technology at work are skyrocketing.

Oliver had an opportunity here at CES to talk on a panel and discuss the impact of consumer trends on the enterprise. The panel discussion opened talking about the challenges of adopting consumer devices. Most of us are both consumers and employees so we can daily relate to this – I know I have the same expectation of a good user experience both at home and at work. The challenge then for IT is to satisfy the demands of employees while managing risk and security concerns. Oliver’s perspective on consumer mobility is that it has helped SAP to drive a mobility mindset of all employees. By providing developers, sales reps, marketing, operations and others with the tablets and smartphones they want, people start to think about mobility intrinsically. According to Oliver “Employees are embracing technology, using it, getting to know it, and want to use it in their work.”

One interesting perspective discussed at this session was that in the past IT had to drive users to accept technology. Today that has flipped – employees are driving the enterprise to adopt the technology they want. And because of this – price no longer drives the sale of technology. One panelist from Verizon stated that “it is the creativity – not the utility that drives the adoption of technology.”

Every discussion I have been a part of on this topic inevitably lands on the topic of management and security. I really liked a quote from another panelist: “Data and knowledge are assets and you have to protect those assets.” Everyone agrees wholeheartedly that any device (whether corporate owned or BYOD) needs to be secured. With the speed that the mobile market is moving, Oliver’s advice was to think beyond today’s devices – the future will bring many new devices and you need a tool that will give you flexibility to grow and change over time. Securing the content on devices is becoming more and more critical – driving to mobile application management as a key trend in 2012.

When we talk about productivity, we know that mobile devices drive increased productivity. Everyone in the room (including me) agreed when one panelist observed that “You don’t watch TV anymore without an iPhone or iPad in your hands.” Business doesn’t stop at 5:00pm or even 11:00pm – it is happening all the time. My phone is the last thing I check before owing to bed and the first thing I check in the morning. I believe that companies can probably recoup their annual costs of a device in a week or two simply through productivity increases.

Oliver noted “The combination of easy access and real time corporate information is what drives consumption.” We automatically think about productivity gains being achieved by replying to email, but the real benefit for executives is instant access to checking pipeline and the status of their business in real time. According to Oliver, this is the killer app. One last observation and bit of advice: “The CEO of the future has to understand the trends in the consumer market and make decisions on how to apply them. Consumerization is a trend that is unstoppable.”