Mobilization has solid advantages for all businesses, including those who help others discover the relevant opportunities and reach their full potential with mobility solutions. If you are an IT-consultant, a mobile developer or a system integrator, now you have good chances to profit from the new mobile way of working.

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IT-consultants

Professional IT services providers with a strong focus on enterprise trends must be aware of the value they can bring for their clients. Consultants can align the mobility projects of the businesses with their overall strategic goals in business development, operations, talent management, and innovation.

They can also help with the assessment of requirements, workflow adjustments, and manage the expectations regarding mobility project implementations times and challenges. Consultants have the background to prove that, as a result of a mobility investment, the performance of the clients will have measurable and sustainable improvements.

Mobile developers

In 2015, Strategy Analytics put the enterprise mobile application development market size at $41bn globally and expected it to reach $63bn by 2020. But the market grew more of a lightning speed, totalling at $74bn in 2016 according to the estimates, and expected to almost double at $128bn in 2022. The research also showed that certain sales force and field force automation apps were more widely used among employees, but corporate email and messaging were still the most popular applications.

Developers with a forward-looking approach can see the opportunities presented by this dynamics of market growth. In the recent years, the profession also attracted many new faces: according to the State of Mobile App Developers survey from 2016, about three-fourth of the developers have been in the industry for less than three years. Also in this survey is data showing that currently, only 8% of developers are working on tools in the enterprise category.

While market growth is steadily supported by the wide expansion of mobile working, the growing availability of cloud and data services and wireless networks, a support system is also starting to develop on the supply side. Application platforms and builder toolkits that use modules for either native or web-based developments let developers create tailor-made, yet ready-to-deploy business applications cutting development times in half.

System integrators

Technavio puts the global system integration services market size at $362bn in 2016, with an 8% CAGR-potential, reaching almost $500bn in value by 2021. Another body, Research & Markets, has a calculation of the value lower, at $270bn for last year, with a prognosis of $388bn for 2021, but still showing a 7.5% CAGR. Yet another report by Grand View Research puts the bar at a value of $528bn to be reached by 2025. Automation and cloud integration seem to be the biggest drivers for growth.

The fragmentation and development, along with the growing investment volumes in IT, have been presenting new opportunities for system integrators, namely, specialisation. One of the specific areas of technology is mobile and integrating mobile solutions is an expertise often leading business to smaller integrators.

Help your clients make the most of their mobility projects – Join the SCOLVO partner community today!

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The sum of the mobile devices, networks, and tools that allow employees to complete work tasks remotely, also known as enterprise mobility, has grown to a market itself, with an incredible potential.

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From an application development perspective, enterprises became an endless market outlet for developers with its exceptional demand driven by competition. And this trend is presenting great potential to the supporting industries as well, such as IT consultants and software integrators.

Here are some statistics that are quite convincing to jump on the bandwagon and add mobile application products to your offers:

1. Enterprise app market doubles in seven years

As a base for all mobile developments, the market of enterprise applications in general (desktop or mobile) was estimated at $150bn in 2015 globally, according to a study by Global Market Insights. The same study calculates with a 7.6% CAGR, suggesting the size of the market will reach $287bn by 2024 – almost double the 2015 figure.

2. Two billion mobile phones sold in a few

As for the devices, the mobile phones’ triumph is obvious: Gartner forecasts that, despite a slowing growth of smartphone sales, there will still be more than 2 billion sold of them by 2019. Such access to devices is driving demand for enterprise apps with performance and usability measures comparable to consumer applications.

3. Half of the employees work on mobile anyway

Regardless of whether their employer supports it or not, already 50% of employees used their smartphones for business purposes in 2015, a report from 451 Research revealed. This is a critical mass enterprises cannot ignore.

4. One in five businesses use 10+ apps already

So, apparently, they don’t even try to ignore the above demand. In an online survey by Canvas in 2015, 20% claimed to use more than ten business apps within the organization. These tools  were mainly cloud-based core apps from third parties, such as file storage apps, credit card processing, CRM, or accounting apps. Meanwhile, trends point in the direction of mobilizing more business processes for a sharper competitive edge.

5. Enterprise mobile app market also doubles in value soon

Accordingly, in 2016, the enterprise mobility market was valued at $74bn by Strategy Analytics. In only five years though, it is expected to reach an almost double value: $128bn. The main drivers behind this growth is the wide expansion of mobile working, especially in sales and field services, but also the growing availability of cloud and data services and wireless networks.

6. 83% of German executives support mobile apps

Accenture has found that even in Germany, where the digital transformation is still not mature, 83% of company executives thought mobile applications were essential to use digital technologies to their full potential. The most supportive industries are utilities and retail with 90%, while banking and insurance show 88% and 85% support ratios respectively. Among the apps already in use, productivity tools had the highest usage rates at 46%.

7. Internal IT-teams can’t keep up with demand

The capacity of internal IT-organization to deliver apps will probably not be enough to meet the ever growing needs for new tools: Gartner predicts that, by the end of this year, the pace of growth for the demand for mobile app development services will be five times faster.

8. The largest industries are still to catch up

So, in order to be or stay competitive, businesses will increasingly need to trust external services providers with their mobility projects. Technology-conscious companies will follow this trend easily, but the real market opportunities will lie in those that have so far been resistant to digitalization, like construction or manufacturing, spending only 1-2% of their multi-trillion-dollar revenues on IT-projects.

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How would you identify a threat to your business? Many say it is the competition being increasingly digital and mobile. But it might also be that it’s you not being digital and mobile. The solution? Facing the challenge – it’s less harmful than you would think.

Adapting is a must

Being able to react faster to challenges is becoming the new norm for the energy industry – a clear sign of the finally ongoing digital transformation. And there are quite a few of the challenges you should react faster to:

• An increasing demand for energy: one study by the US Energy Administration Information projected that global energy consumption will show a 56% increase by 2040.
• The security of supply: Always high on the agenda of energy executives and country representatives, this is an issue that requires a constant lookout for new opportunities and cooperations among countries and market players.
• The responsiveness to consumer problems: according to Pike Research data, 57 million customers used social media to engage with their energy service providers in 2011, and this number is will possibly grow to 624 million by the end of 2017.

Technology-savvy companies can get ahead of the game for sure, but it is also clear that technology in itself will not steer any company in the safety zone. So the question is not whether to adopt technologies or not anymore: in what way you can do it to achieve the best possible results?

Hint: being faster essentially means being more efficient and productive, and this will mainly be due to an optimization of the processes – supported by technology, in and out of the office.

Mobilization for faster reactions

So the good news is that digitalization, and especially workflow mobilization, present new opportunities for energy companies to optimize their operations. What was once a slow and paper-intensive workflow can now be replaced with innovative technology for more efficiency.

A great example is the mobilization of field workers: mobile devices and business apps enable them to provide real-time data about meter stands and outages, or the whereabouts of the worker. The analysis of these datasets then help managers optimize workforce distribution and make decisions regarding business-critical processes.

Energy suppliers successfully manage to introduce digital tools to their maintenance workforce and consequently increase productive hours by 15-20%. Their tools typically include GPS and traffic information added to route planning and management and a diagnostic device helping them with the analysis and the solution of a problem.

Easy-to-use enterprise mobile applications allow for a dramatic increase in productivity, because, for example, the field workers don’t have to spend time with running around with papers. The more adopted a platform or a workflow is, the more visible the improvement in productivity.

To cite another example, a well-known regional energy service provider managed to re-assign 13% of the working hours of each employee to other tasks on a daily basis, resulting a significant improvement in its field operation’s productivity with better planning and management supported by enterprise mobile technology.

Electronic data exchange and instant reporting result in faster fixes, smarter distribution, and more satisfied customers. Ultimately, all these benefits clearly speaks business: an improved profitability of the company.

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Better User Experience

An app that has an easy and intuitive user interface and covers an effective workflow (e.g. no double input of data) will be used to a greater extent, resulting in more work getting done. On the other hand, mobile apps give the opportunity to be geographically flexible by definition, but if this feature is not combined with ease of use, then they quickly become redundant.In a Forrester study, 64% of respondents said they would not use corporate apps because of the poor experience.

When complicated business processes are translated to a few taps and swipes, though, it promotes finding and sharing information as well. Your employees are used to beautiful consumer apps to help with their personal request, and the same kind of experience will enable them to use the enterprise app from day one, drastically cutting training time or skipping it altogether.

Flexibility, Collaboration, and Time

The most obvious feature of a mobile application is that it gives a greater level of flexibility for the employees. Freed from a 9-5 schedule, your employees can benefit from individual peak times to improve overall performance. A recent survey by Vodafone found that 83% of the companies recorded improvements in productivity due to a flexible working policy.

With enterprise social apps and other channels, employees can easily update or even train each other for better outputs. This collaboration can be easily adapted to mobile. One reason to do so is the proven ability to connect workers at remote places who get to combine their expertise when it is most needed even in new ways, such as sketches and other visuals.   

Mobile also helps to get more things done when your team is out on the field for deals: the real-time input of the data (of prospective customers or of orders) results in a faster sales process.

Access to Corporate Data

Input is just one side of the equation – the output, wherever and whenever, is just as important. Mobile business applications help companies better manage their data to reach their full potential.

If everyone has access to the same dataset, regardless of whether or not they are in the office, it radically increases effectiveness and productivity. A good example is the checking of inventory before closing a deal, but knowing about the latest promotion or a recall on a product it’s also essential for the business.

More Savings

Let’s get down to business! For a new mobile tool to be considered for productivity improvements, it should prove that through the productivity gains, business gains are achieved. It could be visible as savings in time or money for the organization.

The better use of human resources through mobility apps, e.g. through converting manual processes to mobile ones, comes with significant costs savings most organizations, a recent mobile app usage survey revealed. Add streamlined business processes and again, finding the necessary information quickly, and you have also saved a good amount of employee uptime.

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