Is enterprise mobile app development the latest trend?

Every CIO has heard of the Internet of things at the Gartner conference and for the first few weeks even discusses it at the staff meetings. But, there ends the story. Before enterprises can think about Internet of things, you need to do a health check and see if there are opportunities for adopting mobile to improve revenue, productivity, efficiency or innovation.

At this week’s “Intel's coming-out party for the Internet of Things”, the dancing robots and death-defying bikes took the center stage. You must be thrilled at this announcement and look forward to adopt these chips in your organizations. Yet, there is a long way to go before these things can become mainstream. The first step in this process would be to adopt mobile in your enterprise.

Unless you start adopting mobile, IoT would become a far-fetched dream that competitors would embrace and forge ahead of you.

Why is that important you might ask? Having worked on enterprise mobile for a few years now, I have seen enterprise mobility providing tremendous functionality at the fingertips of employees. This is powerful when the mobile functionality can be extended to the sensors that can detect and send signals (this is the foundation of the IOT) Unless enterprises step up and embrace mobile to 1. Increase revenue 2.boost employee productivity and 3. Increase efficiencies, the chances of them adopting IOT is remote. Once the mobile tools and techniques are in place, the transition to Internet of things would occur organically.

So, how can enterprise mobile bring value to the table? Take a look at this article Five digital disruptors talk successes and strategies And you will begin to understand why it is such a big deal.

Michael Nilles is the CIO of the Schindler Group, a 141-year old elevator and escalator manufacturing business. He is the winner of this year's MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Award, and alludes to "a real-time maintenance system that connects sensor technology with mobile applications, creating a "digital tool case" for the company's more than 20,000 field workers. If a machine goes offline, sensors send an alert to a central dispatch, where the next course of action is automatically decided, including assigning and even prioritizing the work to a technician in the area"

If you are a warehouse supervisor and you are wondering how to replenish your goods, what orders to be placed is at your fingertips on your device and you just need to approve a PO against the contract with your supplier. Since you are not tied down to your desk, you can walk around the warehouse ensuring that the desired goods are indeed depleted and deactivate temperature control under the replenishment occurs.

And similar to this article, you can also find uses where a driver on the move is tracked with the map feature and also clicks on delivery confirmation, which is in-turn connected to the back end system where inventory is deducted. The trick is to ensure that you act just in time along with no superfluous activities on the device.

It is not just logistics or manufacturing as described above. You can see healthcare, transportation, education, energy and other industries use the enterprise apps to increase their daily efficiency.

The question is not should you but when do you plan to adopt mobile applications internally as well as extend to your customers. This will be the single differentiator to beat competition in this ever-adopting world of digital innovation.