Gartner’s AADI Conference kicked off this morning at the Park Plaza in London with the keynote Gartner Keynote: Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Future delivered by Gartner’s Andy Kyte and David Mitchell Smith. Kyte and Smith talked about the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) that is driving both change and uncertainty. They framed their conversation against the skills and assets that organizations bring from their past, but also about the technology and process “baggage.” To move forward, they said, “…organizations must not just integrate legacy but also do so in a way that minimizes dependencies on legacy thinking.”
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The Mobile Uprising is Anything But a Fad
May 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Everything is changing in how companies must manage business operations in the context of the rise of mobile. The growth of mobility through demand from consumers themselves was one of those revolutions that never could have been predicted. It took 100 years to have a billion landlines, yet it only took 10 years to have a billion mobile phones, and it was only one year before we had one billion smart phones and smart devices used around the world.
Put Down Your Pitchforks
Teams within companies, departments, businesses, and whole industries cannot and should not try to control how people want to consume their services, whether it be executing live trades to buying an upgrade on an airline ticket. This has been a consumer-driven revolution or otherwise termed: the “Consumerization of IT.” [Read more...]
Why Mobility is a Must for Any Sized Business
May 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
There are some things a business can get away without doing and still be successful. And then there are some that used to be acceptable to overlook and will never be again, like mobility. Mobile phones and tablets are starting to take the place of everything we used to use both as consumer and employees. Smartphone cameras are replacing actual cameras and video cameras; tablets are replacing paper books, newspapers, and magazines. Mobility has even begun transforming experiences like shopping and watching a movie.
Almost all aspects of our lives, from entertainment to business, are available with a mobile device, making many things obsolete. When companies do not provide mobile capabilities to their plans and architecture, they are not meeting the needs of the current mobile era we live in. What used to be thought of as a fad is now here to stay. Smartphones are a lasting part of our everyday lives, and a new requirement at any level of business. A company cannot innovate if it’s already behind the times, and cannot keep up if technologies like cloud and mobility are not integrated. [Read more...]
Why Enterprise Needs to Focus On Mobility
May 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In commercials, on blogs, and on the Internet, mobile companies advertise to get their phones in customers’ hands. And it’s working. Customers become strongly attached to their chosen brand of mobile phone, almost to the point of fighting to prove their choice is the best. From the time we wake up to the time we go to bed, our lives revolve around the little devices that do much more than make a phone call. We are attached to our phones and willing to defend them.
Changing Expectations
Mobile users expect their mobile devices to support apps that regularly and automatically update. They expect access to favorite companies through apps, effortless mobile shopping, and the most modern best practices in ease of use. Mobility has become so ingrained in our everyday actions, devices like Google Glass can take a picture from a simple wink of the eye. Mobility has started to change the way we think and associate our actions to where a wink no longer represents a subtle gesture to another person, but a functional component of our machinery. Companies have to keep up with this ever-changing and constantly improving technology. [Read more...]
In Terms of Mobile Apps – Newness is Relative
May 7, 2013 by 1 Comment
It used to be that companies drove traffic solely with a new product launch. While that’s still largely the case for how marketing cycles work, we are in an era of consumer event triggers where each product cycle is increasingly dictated per person. Why? Because new things launch every day and we are constantly inundated by all forms of outbound marketing messaging. There are very few things we need (not want) when they’re new. Sure, new things can be better, but when we have a problem and need a solution, we don’t care when the solution was created; we care that it’s available at our fingertips.
“There’s an App for That”
Nothing speaks to the on-demand nature of solution-seeking like mobile apps. I recently was trying to clean up my music library and after five minutes of de-duping, I thought I’d test out the whole “There’s an app for that” adage and go searching for a solution. Hallelujah! An app that instantaneously answered my prayers — one thousand duplicates gone in a flash! I paid $10 for it (pretty steep by typical app purchases), but well worth it. That app could have been published two years ago for all I care, but it was there when I needed it. It was new and life-changing, and that trigger led me to other apps that I didn’t know I needed or wanted. I became drawn into an ecosystem of products I would not have looked at otherwise. [Read more...]
How Can You Protect and Manage Your Enterprise API?
April 15, 2013 by 1 Comment
Some people think life was easier without smartphones, and less complicated. That argument is a bit of a non-starter as today, smartphones and tablets have become a quintessential part of our modern and busy lives. Everyday activities have forever been changed from reading a book, passing the time by playing a game, or jogging in the park.
The insatiable demand for mobile data and smartphones is putting pressure on network operators to look for the ways to provide safe and improved service to its customers beyond the network, device and plan.
The App Security Stigma
The other day, I got a message from a friend telling me my social media account had been hacked and he’s been getting odd messages and updates from me. It was embarrassing. I figured out I had signed into a third-party web and mobile app using that account which had stolen my log-in. Imagine this happening with a big enterprise, having more complex scenarios than a single person. An enterprise faces the challenge to integrate disparate applications running in heterogeneous environments. Infrastructure has to be monitored in real time and secure internal services from the external exposure through various security measures. It is much more complicated to provide enterprise security, yet all the more important. [Read more...]
Why do Customers Hate Certain Brands and Love Others?
April 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Fans want to support their teams regardless of where they are, or where their teams are playing. No matter if the person is tailgating, watching a game at home, or in the stands cheering the team on, the fan is there in the moment. Especially today, where everything is mobile and people can access information at any time, from any place, fans want the up-to-date information on their teams as it is happening. The critical point of this is that in today’s day and age, the fan is mobile and always on the go. This means the team – the company – has to meet them where they are.
Companies must be able to reach the customer at any time because customer experiences are not just in the store anymore. When a customer can engage with a company on social media channels, on their mobile phones, and leave reviews on the Internet, the customer is leaving a virtual paper trail for other potential customers to come across and leverage for themselves. It is the company’s job to make sure the customer has a pleasurable experience worth sharing.
Location, location, location
Some people cannot wrap their heads around tailgating and why anyone would go to a venue, but never step inside the doors of the actual event – only to watch it on a television screen. The loyal and dedicated fan wants to be there and have a special experience, even if that means not actually being inside the premises. [Read more...]
Why the GOP Needs a Chief Integration Officer
March 25, 2013 by 1 Comment
Over the last couple of months, the Republican party has been doing an in-depth postmortem on their 2012 loss. In the report published by the RNC earlier this week, the number one area identified for improvement was: Data Analytics. It’s a broad term, but, in essence, it means getting better information — for example, who your supporters could be and how to make them vote — and the technology to analyze it.
At first blush, this seems like a surprising area to focus on. But in looking a little more carefully at the on-the-ground capabilities gap between the parties, the importance of analytics, mobile apps and integration really starts to stand out.
Power in the palm of a canvasser’s hand
One example of this gap in capabilities played out at the foot soldier level. The Democrats deployed a mobile canvasing app that integrated public data (voter rolls, demographics), geolocation, analytics and predictive modeling to multiply the effectiveness on neighborhood canvassers. This disruptive take on a decades-old political activity that completely rewrote both the process used as well as the effectiveness of individual canvassers. [Read more...]
Don’t Leave Customers Hungry or Ruin Their App-etite
March 13, 2013 by Leave a Comment
The iPhone and Android now have over 700,000 apps available for download, and with Google’s 120,000, mobile apps total more than 1.5 million. Companies today need to see apps as an absolute must to keep users connected to their brands on the go, with the right functionality. Chipotle Mexican Grill committed a huge mobility faux pas by not updating their app in four years, which left customers with empty stomachs. Checking the box by having a branded app won’t cut it anymore; users need a reason to keep coming back for more.
Stale food
Apps are important to a company’s mobility strategy, but they should just be the front-end of a deeper system. Chipotle’s app sat on home screens collecting virtual dust, and shows how a bad mobile strategy can make a company appear “out of touch.” Before its recent update, Chipotle’s mobile app did not work on most new devices, was not updated to feature new locations, and did not even have appropriate menu options. [Read more...]
Will Mobile Payments Ever See a Big Pay Day?
March 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
*This story was co-authored by Rita Chang.
While a lot of news came out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, the one item that caught our eye was the announced partnership between Visa and Samsung, a development that could give mobile payment a much needed shot in the arm. Under this agreement, Samsung would embed Visa’s payment capabilities into its devices that use the contactless Near Field Communication (NFC) technology, allowing consumers to make purchases by waving their devices nearby an NFC payment terminal.
This collaboration is needed if mobile payment is to gain any global traction. For the first time, we have a ubiquitous payment network allied with the largest smartphone maker in the world. So, what can go wrong?
NFC More Popular in Japan
Merchants won’t invest in NFC terminals unless there’s evidence consumers will embrace the technology, and consumers will ask why they should tap their phones at checkout instead of swiping their credit cards. Japan provides a good study in this case. [Read more...]
