6 Insights To Make Mobile Enterprise Apps Work For You.



In my experience, one of the most common pitfalls is not having senior stakeholder buy-in and sufficient strategy that talks to the purpose and role of an app now and in the future. Is it to save time for the user? Is it to help save money? And what are the key aspects of the technology requirement that mean it needs to be an app and not a responsive website? Is it an offline mode for a remote worker, or to be able to present offline video at meetings with prospects and customers, for example? Apps operate closer to the metal, but the fact is the app needs to have a strong value proposition for the employee and the business.

Six key insights come out of the “Up, Up, And Away” report into mobile enterprise apps from Adobe, and, throughout, an aviation theme is used to help make each point memorable (Adobe is CMO.com’s parent company).

First, many organisations operate in a fragmented way due to silos internally. This results in an unnecessary duplication of effort. The lack of co-ordination can lead to increased cost, delays getting to market, a lack of shared learnings, and a failure to establish a centre of gravity around mobile skills—therefore, a joined-up approach is advocated.

The other area is around manual workflows in order to update apps, and a lack of analytics. Clearly, having KPIs and being able to measure how people use enterprise apps is important, and too often an afterthought. Making measurement and A/B testing a priority is important.



Employees expect enterprise apps to be as good as the ones they use in their everyday life, be it hailing a cab, ordering pizza, or sharing and consuming content. Dumb apps that are miniaturised versions of a website have very little point and are doomed to obsolescence. But if you create an intelligent experience that has a clear purpose as an app, and shows you get what the users are trying to achieve, it will stand you in good stead. That is why it’s good to user-test employee apps with your team, and also to think about a beta launch to further enhance the app’s ability to create a quality experience that considers the when, what, where, and why of your employees.




The fifth topic is that of being careful not to solve problems that don’t exist. Apps need to differentiate from competitors. A great example is that of U.K. taxi-hailing app Hailo, which launched in New York with $100 million in funding, but at the same time as Uber. Hailo couldn’t offer the lowest price, and taxi drivers didn’t need its help to find customers. After realising it wasn’t solving the problems of drivers and riders, Hailo pulled out of New York.


Inspiring case study examples from the likes of Hartford Funds, DuPont, Celebrity Cruises, and ExxonMobil show how value, data, integration, and quality can help recruit new talent, build sales, distribute content, engage fan feedback, strengthen brand, and save time and money.