Mobile Enterprise Apps: Are We There Yet?

It’s summer time which means families are packing up their SUVs and mini vans with all the vacation gear to drive umpteen hours for a nice relaxing vacation – maybe a week at the beach house or lake cottage?  (For the record, my summer vacation was one day long, but I digress).  I’m sure every adult’s favorite part of the road trip is counting the number of times your children ask you “Are we there yet?”  Heck, I remember doing it to my parents and I know they weren’t thrilled.  The phrase however made me think about mobile enterprise applications.  Are we there yet?  Candidly, I don’t know.

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article on Mashable yesterday with a very basic question.  “Philippe…are people not using business apps?  Is it just about email?”  Wow – what a great question.  I think the answer, as with so many other questions, is “It depends.”

Mobile email is still THE killer application in the workplace.  It is THE catalyst for the adoption of mobile devices and hence THE principle driver for the need for mobility management solutions.  The Nielsen survey is interesting in terms of how it showcases the “1 hour” that someone may spend using their smartphone  for things other than phone calls.  Almost half that hour is spent on email – both personal and work related.  Right up there is also social networks.  The key here is that it’s about communicating.

Now mind you, there’s a glaring omission in the survey (understandable, given who conducted it) because it didn’t include work applications.  I wonder how much time that would take up within the proverbial hour.  I suspect not much (yet). Mobile enterprise applications (B2B) are still very task oriented.  They are critical for those people  who are using them, but my sense is they are still islands within the greater workforce.  My sense is that for all the talk and excitement about what we can do with mobile devices, it’s still all about communication.  Ok, so how do we create the communications enabled business process?  For the record CEBP is a term I first heard some years ago from the Avaya folks as they were talking about mobile unified communications.  So is perhaps mobile UC the next major application for the workplace?  Perhaps.

I’ve always been a fan of mobile UC and personally do believe it can be the next major business application given its potentially broad appeal.  By definition, it’s all about communicating….with our corporate social network – which can certainly extend beyond just our colleagues….so it should in theory be a familiar concept for people.  But even with mobile UC, we are not there yet.

So what do you think?  What is it going to take for there to be broad adoption of mobile applications in the workplace?  I know that a large number of organizations are adopting mobile applications, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into broad adoption within those workplaces.  Or does it?

Let’s discuss.