- April 10, 2023
- Posted by: Gopal Krishna
- Categories:
Today, enterprise mobility is a given, with most organizations following a corporate-owned, Personally Enabled (COPE) or a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) strategy or some sort of hybrid of both. Given the rapid evolution of mobile devices, apps, platforms and services, the functions of the IT department of most large organizations have expanded to include enterprise mobile app management (MAM).
The focus on MAM has also grown, from device and app security to developing enterprise application stores and adding and/or removing apps, to ensure the security of corporate data while allowing users to continue to use their personal data and applications.
The next phase in mobility evolution — which has already begun in a small way — is contextual mobility, with enterprise apps providing contextual services and business processes, based on attributes such as type of content, location, user role or time of day. For example, a project management app can bring up relevant past action items/to-do lists based on the names/roles of the people attending a project meeting. Or, a field sales app can bring up client history based on the location of the field sales staff.
Contextual mobility apps can thus provide information that a user might want to know right now, leading to what may be called right-time experiences — experiences that provide the right information at the right time to the right person on whatever mobile device he/she picks. It changes the traditional mobility pull query of “Give me the Answer,” to a push answer of “Here is what you need to know.” Today’s connected world provides the right backdrop for contextual mobility. The rapid proliferation of mobile devices coupled with the enhanced connectivity of devices — GPS- and RFID-enabled as well as sensor-based — has created a huge volume of data, which can be tapped for business insights. This data is used to build apps that create learning, adaptive and predictive business processes and services.
Contextual mobility thus lies at the junction of legacy systems and the new mobile apps environment, and requires the use of newer technologies such as big data and analytics to understand user patterns, to provide superior and contextual user experiences.
Organizations should begin to incorporate contextual mobility solutions into their IT and mobility landscape; we suggest that they start by identifying contextual enterprise mobility use cases within the enterprise that align with their own strategic and business goals. By successfully tailoring personalized mobile application experiences for either employees or customers, based on their wants and needs, organizations can gain more engaged employees and more satisfied customers.
