By: Greg Lueck, Senior Vice President – Global Sales & Marketing, Centerstance

A new report from tracking firm IDC shows that in 2013 mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are projected to hit a billion units shipped for the first time ever. The mobile revolution is well underway – but what does it mean for your business? Here are a few considerations:

Lower barriers to entry allow your business to compete more efficiently. As you grow and expand, instead of renting office space, hiring centralized staff, buying servers and other overhead, you can provision low cost mobile devices for your staff. Add collaboration tools and applications developed to meet your particular business needs and your field team can immediately start contributing to the flow of your business.

Location is no longer an issue. With new developments in mobile technology such as Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud Touch, centralized customer service centers will be a thing of the past – service agents can manage and resolve cases on the go, chat live with customers, and even co-browse on mobile devices for agent-guided assistance.

Being ‘in the moment’ exponentially increases information content and accuracy. Instead of field agents taking notes and uploading info to a centralized system when they return to their home or hotel, by using a mobile device they can enter information on location, in real time. Additionally, with the ease of taking pictures on mobile devices, a photo of something like a broken part can help illustrate the problem much more effectively than a written description.

Applications designed for mobile devices can be created rapidly and cost-effectively. Mobile apps are designed to be elegant, easy to use, process-oriented and solve a very specific business problem all the while having a a very small footprint. Pair this with the ease of typical web application development and the abundance of open source frameworks it makes it straightforward to get up and running quickly and cost-effectively. As your organization grows you have the ability to build extensions onto existing apps to address a particular needs or pain points as they arise. It’s a very agile way to ‘build as you grow.

So you’ve decided to leverage the benefits of mobile technology and plan to build an app for your business. What are some things you should consider before starting?

1. Thoroughly describe your requirements. What specific business problem are you looking to solve? Be specific, but do not try to boil the ocean. You would be surprised how often the smallest feature can drive the most value.
2. Fully define your audience. Who is the user? How do you see them interacting with your application as they go through their day? How do you plan to ensure adoption?
3. Think outside the ‘out of the box.’ Out of the box apps may seem like a cost-effective, rapid way to achieve your goals, but in many cases one size does not fit all – you don’t want to be dependent on a feature set you don’t have control over. Often times with specific process oriented applications applying custom code isn’t as expensive as you might think. You can leverage no-cost frameworks, such as Jquery Mobile and Salesforce.com’s Touch SDK,  to dramatically accelerate past many development milestones. The SDK essentially provides a wrapper for web applications built with Visualforce pages enabling a web app to look and feel like a native app on multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.
4. How do your requirements determine what platform you will use? Will it be a web app designed to be mobile-friendly, a native app on built specifically for iOS or android, or a hybrid of the two? It is critical to understand the pros and cons of each. There are transition points in the users experience that drives your selection, things like support for gestures, accessing the phone book, offline access, and full leverage of other platform features. You can drive out cost and ensure you have what is crucial for the success of your app.
5. Consider the staff members that will be using the application and the environment you are deploying the devices into – will you be leveraging tools that already exist in the field, and if so, are they on a common platform? Or will you be providing the mobile devices to the team and have the ability to standardize? Does the form factor suit the work that is being done, do you need the screen real-estate of a tablet or do you need the mobility of a phone?
6. Distribution. How will you release the app to your organization? Through an appexchange or an enterprise app exchange within your company?

Lueck has more than thirty years of management and consulting experience with a proven track record in strategy and organization development, large project/program management, P&L management, and technical and organizational problem solving. Greg previously managed Cap Gemini’s Pacific Coast Business Unit and orchestrated the start-up of their High Tech vertical market unit.  As the COO and SVP, Global Sales and Marketing of NTT Centerstance, Greg has led the organization to year over year revenue growth, through a merger with Ventus Solutions and an acquistion by the world’s largest global telecom and IT company, NTT Group.