Introduction
The mobility revolution has affected the way millions of people around the world conduct business everyday. IDC Research predicts that by 2015 the working world’s mobile population will reach 1.3 billion, representing 37.2 percent of the total workforce. Furthermore, according to a 2013 Forrester Research study on Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends, 74 percent of firms have either purchased or plan to purchase smartphones for their employees and 65 percent of firms are making similar plans for tablets. Smartphones and tablets present both the biggest change to end-user computing in the last 20 years, and an opportunity to improve productivity for individual workers. They also create an opportunity for large companies, government organizations and small businesses to change the way they transact business and improve operating results.
Given the choice of a traditional Windows-based laptop device or a modern tablet, users are making their choice clear. Regardless of the size of their organization, or their industry, people prefer to take a tablet to meetings, on business trips, and to their offices (instead of a desktop). All they need are the tools to help them replace their PCs with mobile devices.
Organizations that have implemented mobile business initiatives and focused on device management, rather than content enablement, find big challenges in enabling the mobile work-force to become more productive. Focusing on device management can result in cases where millions of dollars are spent on device control, but iPads come out on the weekend at home and/or are primarily used to play games, and smartphones are only used only for basic commu-nications (calls, emails, instant or text messaging) but are not really integrated into the enterprise. Mobile technology leaders who participated in IBM’s 2013 study of Global Mobile Infrastructure clearly specified the greatest benefits they’ve experienced after implementing mobility solutions (Figure 1). Improved customer interactions, growth of revenue, and increased productivity top the list, while better “management” of devices or
user content is absent.
Increase and improve customer interaction
In what area is your company achieving the greatest benefits as a result of mobility?
Increase sales/ revenues Enhance employee productivity Improve customer service Improve customer satisfaction Increase employee and business partner responsiveness and decisions
Mobile Technology Leaders All Others
42% 10% 40% 10% 35% 9% 38% 10% 38% 13% 36% 13% Figure 1
Why Are We Missing Mobile
Productivity Gains?
With over 80% of companies reporting that employees already use a personal mobile device to access work data (source AT&T), the bring-your- own-device program (BYOD) is an integral part of most organizations. Since the introduction of the iPhone®, iPad® and the explosion of Android
devices in the enterprise, millions of dollars have been spent on mobile device security and control to allow the use of BYOD in the enterprise. The management of mobile devices in IT is an important concept that provides an infrastructure, or platform, on top of which other services and solutions can be added. It does not in itself enable a user to do more with the mobile device — sell more, service customers better, enable business partners, or learn from each other.
A more administrative approach benefits the IT organization, to make sure the devices can interact with the content that employees need to get their work done.
According to research from Gartner, between 2012 and 2013, 64% of enterprises reported that mobility projects forged ahead without the full involvement of IT. Employees acquired and connected mobile devices, personal DropBox accounts, and even personal applications through Amazon Web Services (AWS) to their corporate IT services. Why is this happening? When employees don’t have access to the right tools through their employers, they search out solutions on their own to keep their work — and the company — moving forward.
“By 2016, 20% of enterprise
BYOD programs will fail due
to enterprise deployment of
mobile device management
features that are too restrictive.”
Forrester’s Forrsights Workforce Employee Survey, Q4 2012
Which of the following applications do you use on these devices for work?
Email Word processing Web browser Intranet portal Presentation tools Web conferencing File sync Team sites Public social network Travel apps Finance apps Expense apps Internal social network Public microblog Human resources (HR) appsData dashboard Internal blog
Base: 2,709 North American information workers using each device 0 20 40 60 80 100
Internal microblog Internal wiki Customer relationship management (CRM) Supply chain apps Enterprise resource planning (ERP)
Internet portals are missing from the mobil app list. File sync beats out all other collaboration tools on tablets. Among mobile workers, the application portfolio is huge and diverse.
Social applications are more common among tablet users than computer users.
Mobile workers are more likely to use CRM, HR, or ERP apps.
Computer (N=2,699) Tablet (N=605) Smartphone (N=1,303)
Control and Management ≠ User
Enablement and Productivity
Gone are the days when employees used a single, tethered computer with a small set of tools to get work done. The convenience of mobile devices has changed the expectation of the mobile workforce Employees need access to enterprise content, information resources and to productivity tools to conduct business from any location on any mobile device. Unfortunately, there is a large gap between mobile device control and usability.
While implementing a Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution — and its ancillary management an control structures for apps and content — is important for device control, it is never designed to enable user productivity. Thinking about the mobility revolution as an “IT management” approach has not improved workflows. This approach doesn’t
help users access and work with the right content at the right time and location. Nor does it enable them to learn from their peers over a mobile device. The same goes for employees who build their own tools. There is paradigm shift from “IT management and device administration” to “end-user enablement on the mobile device.” The focus should be on how to improve the “streaming of pixels” from the corporation to the device. Enablement requires us to think about how to help the mobile workforce to engage with content in a ways that have not been able to do before. Millions of users on mobile devices need the productivity tools to engage and do more.
Mobile Content Enablement
“Rich mobile devices like
Windows and Android phones
and tablets and Apple iOS
devices have raised
expec-tations about accessibility
and the user experience. This
shapes expectations about
how people work.”
Gartner – What Apple® iPad and Other Mobile Devices Mean for Collaboration Planners, July 2013
BUSINESS ENABLEMENT
Management
Security, Governance & Content
Productivity
Engagement & Measurement Automation & OptimizationProcess
O N E U S E R E X P E R I E N C EContent is King
The creation of content, how it is processed, and how it is improved are key workflow indicators. In the mobile business world “content is king.” King because used in the right way, as a method of representing the ideas, things and even the thought process that people create, will communicate value, differentiation, influence and decision in clear, consistent and compelling ways on the mobile device.
With the proliferation of mobile devices, has come an explosion of content. Users now have access to amazing amounts of content from many different systems, including all the tools and systems they need to do their jobs. “Content” now means more than just the list of files and folders from the N: Network Shared Drive in the office, or a list view of a standard folder tree on a cloud storage file system. For today’s mobile device user, content includes everything on their mobile device: apps, web sites, interactive forms, HTML5 mini apps running locally, interactive media players, animated presentations, RSS feeds, social media, calendar events, and even files and folders. And where content is king, context is queen. Delivering the right, relevant, curated content to the right person on their mobile device is critical to ensuring employees are productive and not distracted by content they don’t need. According to the Content Marketing Institute (2014), the average enterprise uses 17 different tactics to distribute original content. Asking the average enterprise user to learn and then interact with these multiple systems is causing a major problem in
the uptake of content inside the enterprise. The result is confusion on where users can find the information they need.
According to a report by leading independent marketing analyst firm SiriusDecisions, 70% of content churned out by b-to-b marketing departments today sits unused. That’s billions of dollars of wasted work from knowledge workers each year — and it’s been going on for decades. How does this problem exist, when economic downturns and recessions have forced almost every other area of business to become more efficient? Organizations should not keep churning out documents, brochures, white papers, and PowerPoint presentations without understand-ing whether they are beunderstand-ing used. The trick is to figure out which 30% of content is being used — and how it’s being used.
Challenges the B2B Content Marketers Face
0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100
2014 B2B Content Marketing Trends -
North America: Content Marketing Institute/Marketing Profs
69%
55%
47%
39%
38%
33%
26%
25%
25%
23%
15%
10%
Lack of TimeProducing Enough Content
Producing the Kind of Content That Engages Lack of Budget
Producing a Variety of Content
Inability to Measure Content Effectiveness Lack of Integration Across Marketing Inability to Collect Information from SMEs Lack of Knowledge and Training
Lack of Buy-in/Vision Lack of Integration Across HR
The Problem with the Sales Organization
A recent Corporate Executive Board study of more than 1,400 business-to-business customers found that nearly 60% of purchasing decisions have been made (research on solutions, ranking options, setting requirements, benchmarking pricing) before having a meeting with a supplier sales representative. If an organization’s sales representative is not well prepared with the right content before meeting with a well-informed prospect, the results will be disastrous. In addition, IDC Research on sales enablement discovered that 57% of sales reps are not well prepared for an initial call with a buyer. When only 5 out of 10 of field reps are prepared for a sales call before it starts, and it’s likely that the customer is already close to making a decision, there’s an opportunity to improve sales productivity and stop wasting time and money. The problem is probably not whether the sales organization is motivated, but rather that they don’t have access to the right content or knowledge when they need it.
What Do You Mean By Enablement?
Mobile Content Enablement is all about ensuring the success of the mobile worker, by focusing on their needs. Specifically, it’s about:
• Enabling users to get access to and engage with the content they need, when they need it, wherever they are, so they don’t have to access and learn multiple systems to be productive.
• Focusing on providing access to the tools, content and information that users need to do their jobs better than in the past.
• Implementing a platform that’s secure and powerful and has an engaging, user-friendly interface that is built with mobile users in mind.
Buyer – Seller Alignment
At your initial meeting, what percentage of reps were:
Not Prepared
26%
Somewhat Prepared31%
Very Prepared27%
Extremely Prepared16%
Not Prepared 26% Somewhat Prepared 31% Very Prepared 27% Extremely Prepared 16%For a Regional Sales Manager, this could mean using their tablet or smartphone to access: reports from her field sales team, a mobile forms-based workflow process, local and remote legacy apps, push- delivered content from Microsoft SharePoint, and salesforce.com. At the same time, she could create her own content (files, notes, pictures, and more) that can be tied into a corporate controlled back end. It all can be realized through a single, scalable, easy-to-use content-based platform that works across all mobile devices.
Sharing Best Practices
Another element of fully enabling the field is to identify and share their tribal knowledge, or best practices. The right content-based platform will allow you to identify the achievements of your top performers and pass their methods on to the rest of the organization. Identifying “what works” and transforming success stories into repeatable behavior is a sure path to success. For example, identifying which pieces of content were shared throughout a successful sales engagement could help other salespeople with their processes. Or, learning how top customer service representatives aid customers using corporate systems can improve that department’s workflow. And, this can be accomplished with the right content enablement platform in a passive manner.
Can’t I Just Build My Own Apps and Enable My Mobile Workforce
That Way?
The answer is yes. You can take specific parts of your enterprise’s work processes and turn them into engaging applications for mobile devices. But to make an investment in process-centric apps more rewarding, you need to build them around a horizontal content-centric platform that’s designed to deliver immediate productivity benefits across the entire organization. An “app for that” has real power inside the enterprise, but to make it even more flexible, powerful and quicker to market, it’s vital to build on a mobile content delivery and interaction platform.
It’s also tempting to build “silo” apps — or apps that just address a single workflow issue. Loading your employees with multiple apps requires them to learn additional interfaces and toggle between apps. This is not a great way to improve productivity.
Automating Manual Tasks for
the Mobile Workforce
Making enterprise applications mobile device friendly is a non-trivial effort. Providing all the features and capabilities of an enterprise business appli-cation to a field service/repair technician, route delivery person, insurance claims adjuster or sales professional on their mobile device is unnecessary. There’s no need to port an entire ERP system, procurement application, time/expense system or employee portal to a tablet or smartphone. Organizations should focus on the specific tasks and processes that need to be addressed in the field, and enable mobile users to execute them using their mobile devices. In many cases these tasks are manual in nature.
Consider a claims adjuster’s workflow, which requires field-based interactions and high degree of accuracy. These individuals are required to collect information at a policyholder’s location with paper-based manual forms and cameras to provide
separate visual documentation. Then, they transfer the information into a back office business system on the corporate network, via a laptop or desktop back at their office. Using an interactive, user-friendly form on a mobile device to complete this transfer of information would be far more efficient.
By leveraging the mobile device’s capabilities across multiple content types (photo, video, documents and forms) coupled with the ability to process information into corporate systems via a wireless network, we can consolidate and automate a number of manual processes in this scenario to improve this mobile worker’s productivity.
“The fragmentation of apps
and services for mobile
content access, collaboration
and productivity increases
the complexity of workplace
innovation initiatives, raising
the challenges for the IT
organization.”
Gartner – Mobile Collaboration Will Drive Innovation in Your Workplace, August 2013
Ensuring My Mobile Business Initiative Is Successful
Implementing a mobile content enablement platform leads to mobile user productivity, and is the foun-dation for a successful mobile business initiative. bigtincan’s approach to mobile content enablement delivers content from different systems to a single platform, without concerning the user which content repository the content and information originated.
bigtincan has created the industry’s leading mobile content enablement platform, bigtincan hub, which enables mobile workers to work with any type of content from any platform on any type of mobile device without having to learn and access multiple systems. Users get dynamic push content delivery — ensuring access to the right content for the right people at the right time and location — even when offline — layered with the security and control that the enterprise needs.
And with bigtincan’s flexible definition of content, users can be provided role-based access to what they need to do their jobs, from file and folder access, to HTML5 apps, animated presentations, multimedia content viewers, web sites, mobile forms and workflow and more. And users can do more than just access and view content — they can create and edit content (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, feeds, forms, notes and more) from their mobile device. This keeps them in the field and more
produc-Other Examples Include
Patient
Monitoring
A patient submits a form once a day reporting their progress. Clinical support staff monitor submissions and respond if the patient has concerns. Data accumulates in the database and can be extracted for analysis.
Field Service
Technicians
A Service Work Order (SWO) form is created by office staff and allocated to a field technician. The SWO appears on the technician’s mobile device and the technician is notified. The work is performed, the form is updated and extra information (such as photos, notes, spreadsheets, etc.) is attached. When finished, the technician marks the work order as complete. The form is then synced from the mobile device back to central hub and the new information is made available to the desktops of the office staff to review and close.
Self-Service for
Road-Warriors
Form-submission capabilities for ordering business cards or printed collateral, requesting demo requests for prospects, product/ solution configurators, submitting expense reports or order entry forms.Implementing a Secure Mobile Content Enablement System
Implementing bigtincan hub is easy. Either a cloud- or premise-based system can be up in minutes, and scale to tens of thousands of users. Both work in conjunction with corporate management systems, and provide secure employee access to your corporate content no matter what kind of mobile device is being used (BYOD or corporate deployed, smartphone or tablet). It allows for the distribution, management and governance of a range of content, including documents and rich media content. Enabling secure access and interaction with a wide range of information resources over mobile devices is an imperative for managing risk and compliance objectives, and bigtincan hub provides enterprise-grade security.
Key Security Advantages of bigtincan hub
Secure Protocol Use: The system is based on Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) communications, encrypting the link that end-user devices use to get access to the server.
File Obfuscation: Files are not stored using their original file names. All files uploaded to the server are obfuscated.
Internal Content Store: The content store server can be hosted in a secure bigtincan cloud facility or internally, behind the corporate firewall and other secure private network access restrictions. With the creation of an internal content store, the enterprise can control access to data for its employees and approved external parties. All content stored on the server is encrypted and access is controlled through user authentication.
Ability to Remote Wipe: The bigtincan hub server can initiate a remote wipe of content from devices automatically over the air. This allows the organization to immediately remove content, including both read and unread, from the device in real time. This system works even if the user has the bigtincan hub application open and is engaged in the content to be deleted. This process also allows for live-editing content, with new content replacing existing content on the device.
Selected Content Cache of File Attachments: bigtincan hub offers the option of providing device-side content cache for file attachments. Organizations that choose to disable content cache will force a reload of file content each time the user accesses it, ensuring that no secure content is on a lost or stolen device.
Two-factor Authentication: bigtincan uses a unique device identifier to identify the specific device that a user is using to access the content store. It is possible to whitelist devices that are usable on the system and tie them to a user account to select which content is delivered to each device. This gives the ability for the end system to deliver specific content to a unique device.
Jailbreak Detection: bigtincan hub incorporates technology to work with Apple iOS-delivered encryption to detect ‘jailbroken’ iOS devices, and ‘rooted’ devices on Android. This secure structure controls highly sensitive content and ensures that the organization does not expose secure content to devices that have been compromised.
Network Access Control: The system allows network access to be controlled to a specific set of IP addresses, ensuring that only approved users are able to access the server and engage with content. Content Expiry: A specific expiry date can be set for specified content. The content is automatically removed from all the devices, with no user intervention, on the expiry date.
Location Based Content Controls: Content can be tied to a location determined either by a GPS coordinate (Lat/Long) and radius, or by micro-location systems like iBeacons, allowing users to only get access to the content when they are in a particular area.
Mobile Content Enablement with bigtincan Allows You to Focus On the Key Elements in Driving a Successful Mobile Business Initiative:
• Creating and deploying the ideal mobility platform for your entire mobile workforce
• Empowering your employees with the ability to access and engage with the right information and content
• Getting users to work quickly, and productively, on their mobile devices
• Sharing “tribal knowledge” practices from top performers to improve overall team results
We invite you to visit us at www.bigtincan.com and get a free trial of bigtincan hub, the industry’s leading mobile content enablement platform for your organization.
