Internal Apps Give a Competitive Edge to Mobile Workers
It’s hard to imagine an employee today without a Blackberry or iPhone in hand -- and with good reason. A report from Forrester Research predicts that by 2015, about half of all devices on U.S. corporate networks will be mobile. And global research company IDC predicts that by 2011, the number of mobile workers is expected to pass 1 billion worldwide, with nearly 75 percent of the U.S. workforce mobile, up from 68 percent in 2006. Along with the growing mobile workforce has come workers’ growing embrace of mobile software applications to help them get the job done.
Online app stores are chock full of productivity apps for mobile workers, but it can be hard for employees to find the right app for a specific job function, or for IT departments to control how these apps are being used. Several big companies, however, have found a solution to these dilemmas by creating in-house mobile apps for their own internal use.
IBM recently launched an online app store called Whirlwind that allows employees to access mobile software apps that help them get their work done. In the first six weeks Whirlwind was up, more than 11,000 IBM employees downloaded in-house apps for everything from scheduling conference rooms to approving purchasing orders -- right from the comfort of their mobile devices.
In January 2010, San Francisco-based biotech company Genentech created its own office app called On the Road to help its pharmaceutical reps record the results of their sales visits to physicians. Before On the Road, senior managers at Genentech had grown frustrated that reps were not entering their sales call transactions into a laptop or desktop computer at the end of the day. A mere 56 percent of the nearly 40,000 monthly U.S. sales calls were being logged more than a week after they were made. With On the Road, however, the number of sales calls being logged each day has doubled from about 20 percent to 40 percent. In addition to On the Road, Genentech offers 15 other internally developed apps available to more than 8,000 mobile workers who use iPhones.
You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 company with a million-dollar IT budget to create your own internal apps, however. There’s a plethora of third-party developers who can work within your budget to design office apps tailored specifically to your company and your mobile workforce’s needs.
You can even create your own homegrown apps through a developer kit like Apple’s iOS Developer Enterprise Program, which will help you develop proprietary, in-house iPhone and iPad apps that you can distribute to employees. The cost is $299 per year. If you issue Android or BlackBerry devices to your mobile workforce, Google and BlackBerry offer their own developer kits to quickly and inexpensively create internal compatible office apps.
But what if you don’t issue mobile devices to employees?
“When you allow employees to bring in their own devices, you run into problems with application management,” says Paul Nerger, vice president of sales for Ondeego, a company that helps businesses build and manage in-house app stores.
“There are so many operating systems out there that it’s difficult for companies to know who’s downloaded what [application], how they’re being used, and how often they’re being used. Plus, if an employee loses his device or leaves the company, you can’t remotely wipe the device because it’s not your device,” Nerger says.
Ondeego offers two solutions to these problems: AppCentral and AppGuard.
AppCentral lets you create a custom mobile app store for your employees that is stocked with your company’s internal and select external applications. Mobile workers can easily find the right applications for their mobile device and search by job function and company vertical. Plus, AppCentral applications can be locked or remotely deleted with AppGuard, so that data is not at risk if the phone is lost or stolen, or if the employee leaves the company.
AppCentral supports BlackBerry, iPhone, and J2ME applications, with partial support for Android (right now Ondeego can distribute Android apps but cannot remotely manage them, a function that’s coming soon). The price for both AppCentral and AppGuard is $4 per user per month.
As more and more workers replace their desktop apps with mobile apps, the most logical solution for your company will be to develop tailor-made smartphone applications that cut costs and improve employee efficiency. And you won’t be alone. According to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, companies will spend an estimated $1.76 billion in 2010 developing their own in-house office apps, a figure that’s expected to rise to $6.85 billion by 2015.
