Mobile employees need mobile apps. Mobile apps help field personnel to be more productive and often enable them to generate new revenue streams and improve customer service (and the corporate brand!). However, as companies seek to integrate mobile technologies into their application infrastructures, they are faced with an important choice. Is it more important to use an existing (or new) application that was designed for corporate server infrastructures – or one that is designed expressly for today’s cloud-based, mobile environment?
For a number of reasons (a few of which I’ll list below), I believe applications that “are made for mobile” are the right choice for companies of any size. Here are the reasons why:
For example: A mobile field service application might make key capabilities like access to and updating of job, customer, task and inventory information always available to a field worker. While personnel in the back office (scheduling, dispatch, management) would find the work/employee scheduler available from any screen.
Field workers record work – office workers plan. Application interfaces should be designed to help them do their work – efficiently!
If we again use our field service application as an example, a widget that describes a work crew would have its own, separate view. Field workers would have to navigate from the job (work order) view to get there. However, for office workers using a standard web interface, there would be a single web page that contained all job (work order) related widgets – including the crew widget.
Office workers can plan – and schedule – work crews, while field workers “work” the job! Again, the application interface should help the worker to be more productive!
As a result, both the mobile and cloud-based components of the solution are tuned and optimized for their platforms (cloud/mobile) and their users (office/mobile worker). So are made for mobile applications different – and the right choice for almost any business? If we make that decision based on worker productivity, application performance and ease of integration with existing business applications – the answer is a resounding “YES”.
By Andronikos Nedos