Why create a mobile app for your business? Following are
five good reasons.
1 - Everyone is doing it. To remain competitive, you must do so
too. Mobile development is a source of strategic competitive advantage.
- Mobile is fundamentally changing conventional industries and the
way they interact with the marketplace.
- Gartner expects mobile technologies to be the #2 priority for
Chief Information Officers (CIOs) in 2012 with 61% of survey participants
that plan to improve their mobile capabilities over the next 3 years.
(see http://w3.ibm.com/ibm/resource/ibm_on_ciostudy2011.html).
- 74% of the 3,000 CIOs interviewed in IBM’s 2011 CIO study noted
that mobility solutions was their second most important visionary
plan element, a 6% increase from 2009. Almost all the CIOs said they
expected to deploy more than 25 mobility applications for their employees
in the next two years (see McKinsey Mobility Disruption - CIO Perspective
September, 2012 http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1897514).
- The rate of mobile adoption in the 21st century is outpacing both
the Personal Computer (PC) revolution of the 1980s and the Internet
Boom of the 1990s. IDC estimates that over 800 million PCs were sold
between 1981 and 2000, making the rate of Apple iOS and Google Android
device adoption more than four times faster than that of personal
computers.
2 - Increase customer satisfaction and engagement.
- In 2011, the population on the planet reached 7 billion; in 2012,
6 billion people were reported mobile subscribers. Mobile is becoming
a basic human need (Source: Mobile Industry Statistics.doc in Connections).
- "Mobility wins" will be the top theme of the year as mobile devices
out-ship PCs by more than 2 to 1 and generate more revenue than PCs
for the first time. 85 billion mobile apps will be downloaded, and
mobile data network spending will exceed fixed data network spending
for the first time (Source: IDC.com, "IDC Predictions 2012: Competing
for 2020", 2012).
- Extend your existing web-based interaction to mobile users.
- Provide a "personal touch," with personalized offers, to make
customers feel like you know and care about them to increase loyalty.
- For example, in retail, Smartphones are now being used as payment
devices, increasing customer satisfaction with the shopping experience.
3 - Drive your brand and drive differentiation of it.
4 - Improve employee productivity and satisfaction.
5 - Provide on-demand access to business data and facilitate rapid
decision-making.
- Enable remote professionals with mobile solutions to pitch new
projects with access to real-time analytics to evaluate projects,
allowing them to respond to Requests for Proposals in minutes instead
of days, allowing them to pitch and win more new business.
- In industries such as medical, utilize mobile devices for medical
monitoring to improve care and speed-up decision-making.
- Supporting the mobile revolution is a broad set of cloud-based
applications that enable mobile devices to overcome many of their
inherent limitations. This environment enables users to access their
content regardless of the storage capacity of their devices. Cloud-based
enterprise applications enable ubiquitous access to critical enterprise
resources, such as customer relationship management (source: McKinsey
Mobility Disruption - CIO Perspective September 2012, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Mobility_disruption_A_CIO_perspective_3019).