Mobile apps skewed internally, CIOs should watch out

 

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Indian organizations embrace mobile applications for employee enablement, but must also target external customers," as per Forrester Research analyst Katyayan Gupta.

From June to August 2013, Forrester invited large and medium-size organizations in India to share details about their live enterprise mobility applications. "Our objective was to understand how Indian organizations are leveraging mobile applications to better connect with customers, partners, and employees. In total, we received details of 59 mobile application projects from 41 organizations with more than 500 employees in India. These organizations are spread across verticals like manufacturing, financial services, automotive, media, healthcare, professional services, telecommunications, and utilities." he points out.

The research provided some interesting findings like mobile application development is skewed toward internal, employee-facing projects.Among the projects reviewed, 59 per cent of the enterprise mobility applications have been developed for internal employees, 24 per cent target customers, and the remaining 19 per cent are for business partners. Most organizations in India are first developing applications for employees, because calculating the ROI is easier and more tangible for employee-centric applications as compared with customer- or business partner -centric applications. For instance, sales force/field force automation is currently the most commonly developed mobile application by Indian organizations.

"The majority of projects are co-owned by IT and business. 71 per cent of the enterprise mobility application projects we covered are jointly owned by the IT team and the relevant business stakeholders. Business inputs, especially on user interface and experience, are key to ensuring adoption of mobile application post-launch." Katyayan highlights.

The average cost of application development is between US$40,000 and $160,000. The cost for developing 55 per cent of the mobile applications was between $40,000 and $160,000; 23 per cent of the applications cost less than $40,000, while the remaining 22 per cent cost more than $160,000.

This cost primarily consists of two parts: 1) development costs like application coding, user experience design, integration, and testing; and 2) operational costs such as licensing of mobile device management solutions and support and training costs.

Katyayan also notes in his blog post that, mobile app development is skewed towards internal, employee-facing projects and the majority (71 per cent) of projects are co-owned by IT and business, showing greater collaboration. Also, Application development is mostly outsourced (56 per cent).The research further indicates that mobile applications will be a more critical channel for reaching consumer markets in Asia Pacific in the future compared with more developed Western markets.

He hence, advises that I&O professionals and their CIOs should broaden their mobility focus beyond employee enablement to include a greater focus on externally focused systems of engagement that can empower individuals to take the next most likely action, as it will help drive explosive growth in engagement.

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