Employee-Facing Apps

For the past decade, enterprise mobility has been adopted by industry-leading companies around the world to gain competitive advantages and drive business productivity and process improvement.

The early adopters deployed highly customized mobile apps to front line mobile workers, such as field service and field sales organizations. These mobile apps typically ran on specialized mobile devices, many of these relying on tethered data synchronization versus over-the-air wireless connectivity for transactions. Today, wireless data networks have improved dramatically, both in terms of coverage and performance, and the handheld devices have evolved from simple PDAs (personal digital assistant) to full-fledged smartphones with advanced computing power and connectivity to high speed cellular and Wi-Fi networks.

At the same time, enterprise-facing mobile apps for employees have not evolved in step to take advantage of the computing power or speed of today’s smartphones and networks. These apps still tend to be designed with little, if any, graphics and they tend to overwhelm the user with too much data and too many screens.

Workers are demanding more from their enterprise mobile apps. They see how simple, elegant and flashy mobile apps can be with the ones they download from the various device app stores. Why can’t employee-facing mobile apps produce the same level of excitement and ease-of-use?