Just a few days ago Apple made a huge announcement. No, not the golden watch or the new thin MacBook.
As a recognition to us here at Weekdone, Apple featured our mobile team collaboration and status updates tool on their website. Not just once, but twice: in both the iPad business apps and iPhone business app categories. If you have one of those devices, you definitely should download Weekdone.
To be recommended by Apple next to essential apps like their own Keynote and Numbers, or the ones like Quickbooks and Omnifocus made our hearts beat faster. Apple knows what they’re talking about. Hope it’s a good reason to give us a try – it’s free to start.
On the other hand, this did not come to us as a surprise. Mobile team tools are a reality. They’re here to stay. For almost 2 years we have seen the mobile enterprise developing and we’ve made big bets on it. We have invested in our Android and iOS apps, which are now in use by tens of thousand of users from Fortune 500 to startups and SMEs. Whenever someone is looking for a mobile team status reporting or mobile OKR tool, Weekdone is the answer.
2015 – the year of mobile enterprise
This is a good time to review the current status of mobile tools used in business. We made a special infographic to prove that 2015 is the year of mobile enterprise. Now is the last moment to think how to make your team processes and communication mobile. By checking the latest research, here is what we found out.
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Looking at the stages of mobile usage there are clear evolutionary steps. First is always the communication. Second are the dashboards, analytics and data tools. Horizontal and vertical apps follow. The holy grail are the transformative apps and businesses built solely on mobile.
IDC predicts that by 2017, almost 100% of customer-facing and 75% of internally facing line-of-business apps will be built for mobile. Apps optimized for mobile will quadruple by next year. It’s a clear message, that consumers and employees love doing their jobs on mobile.
You can read below what 2 prominent investors are saying about work on mobile and the opportunity there. Our predictions for 2015 are:
- Design of purely mobile-oriented workflows and processes will grow.
- Mobile analytics and quantified employee data will be one of killer apps on mobile.
- Web apps skinned for mobile will be replaced by mobile-only apps also in enterprise and line-of business apps.
[ Article continues below the infographic – scroll down ]
Why invest in mobile?
The reasons to start using mobile tools in your team or company are varied. First, leaders want to save costs and increase revenues. We want to make our employees more productive – one key motto for Weekdone. At the same time employees using the mobile apps have to see the benefit for them by becoming more satisfied and engaged at workplace.
What we’ve seen among our mobile users is that all of those goals are important and if implemented well, the measurable results are there.
The key benefits that Weekdone users mostly bring out in our surveys for mobile are:
- Knowing what co-workers are doing
- Improving productivity and focus
- Improving internal communication
- Having a visual employee dashboard
On average, companies expect 40-60% of productivity increase, if all enterprise apps were to be mobilized.
Success factors of mobile in business
How to implement mobile apps well? According to surveys, the key is always the down to earth benefit of effectively solving the actual business problem.
For end-users though, the key is always ease of use, which drives adoption. Our employees are human beings, used to beautiful simple apps like Twitter, Facebook and Instragram. Anything you implement in your team must be just as visual and easy to use.
One interesting area is the amount of devices per person. Over the years we have grown to over 3 mobile devices used by each knowledge worker. The prediction for coming years is for the number to grow to 6 per person. It means your apps must also support all those devices.
What we’ve seen at Weekdone is that based on occasion, the same service really does get used on different devices. You add your tasks quickly on mobile, add comments on tablets, read the reports via e-mail and do longer writing on the PC. While Apple iOS still rules in enterprise, Android is also coming on strong.
Next steps to take your business mobile
The best suggestion we can give you today is to listen to Apple and try out Weekdone with your team. You’ll like it. Sign up on the web here (it’s free to try) or download one of the mobile apps here.
Download the infographic 2015 the year of mobile in your business in PDF here.