An interesting new white paper put together by Orange and Accenture takes a look at how and why enterprises should deploy mobile applications. You can download the paper in its entirety here and I've written a quick summary of the key introductory points below. The paper also includes several detailed case studies from a number of sectors and countries and advice on how to deploy mobile applications.Why are so many businesses launching mobile applications?
- Mobile applications are maturing and becoming much more widely used by consumers.
- Costs of development are shrinking as are the costs of devices, such as smartphones. Some 300,000 mobile applications have already been developed to date.
- Support and security of mobile applications has improved dramatically and you can launch and control applications easily to individual groups of users
What are the benefits of mobile applications?
- Improved productivity gains mainly through better efficiency.
- Speeded up business processes.
- Better user and brand experience for employees and customers.
- Green benefits by increasing paperless processes and reducing travel
What is driving this trend?
- Increased employee mobility
- Businesses want to be more efficient
What is the cost of developing mobile applications?
- The device: your employees may need a different device to use the applications
- Application development costs
- Integration costs into your existing systems
- Testing, deployment and training
- Recurring application maintenance and support
- Recurring connectivity costs
Different types of applications for different business needs
- Sales force automation: give sales staff on the move access to key information
- Business companion: calendaring, contacts, expenses for people travelling
- Field force enablement: improve the performance of your field engineers and other staff
- Business intelligence: get up to date information and reports
After a Masters in Computer Science, I decided that I preferred writing about IT rather than programming. My 20-year writing career has taken me to Hong Kong and London where I've edited and written for IT, business and electronics publications. In 2002 I co-founded Futurity Media with Stewart Baines where I continue to write about a range of topics such as unified communications, cloud computing and enterprise applications.