Does IT work?: Mobile apps making real difference in many sectors

Does IT work?: Mobile apps making real difference in many sectors
By Stephen Pritchard

Published: February 15 2010 11:40 | Last updated: February 15 2010 11:40

The market for mobile applications is growing at a frenetic rate. Gartner, the analytic company, expects revenue from applications – across all the main mobile platforms – to grow from $4.2bn in 2009 to $29.5bn in 2013.

This growth is all the more impressive, considering that a market for downloading mobile phone applications hardly existed before Apple launched its iPhone in 2007.

The vast bulk of those downloads are based around entertainment or personal productivity. But business software vendors are starting to wake up to the possibilities, as chief information officers, for example, become increasingly willing to use mobile business applications and distribute them via applications stores.

This is the approach adopted by the French arm of Generali, the life assurance provider. The company approached Accenture, the IT consultant, to write an iPhone application.

The app is aimed at self-employed financial advisers who sell Generali products. They can download the software directly from Apple’s iPhone app store and use it to track clients’ portfolios via a 3G or wi-fi connection. The app provides simple graphical representations of clients’ holdings and asset allocations.

According to Bertrand Boré, director of internet and distribution strategy at Generali France, a smartphone is simply a better tool to help advisers do business, especially when they visit clients.

“We were already quite advanced in providing online information to financial advisers,” he says. “But we were meeting a limit with the need for a wi-fi connection, and to take a laptop. If you are in a meeting with a client, it is not that easy to connect yourself, whether it is in a coffee bar or their office. So we built on the mobile concept to give advisers that information anywhere.”

In the US, Nationwide, the insurer, pursued a strategy of developing mobile applications that are not specific to a single platform. The company’s mobile staff mostly use BlackBerrys, but, says Robert Burkhart, head of technology innovation, there are also users with iPhones, the Droid (a phone from Motorola that uses the Android operating system), Symbian and Windows Mobile.

“We are now also asking whether it has to be a company-owned phone or whether it could be a personal device. We want to protect our data and our intellectual property, but we also want to ensure that we see the productivity gains associated with giving staff the information they need to do the job,” he says.

Despite the extra efforts involved, developing specific mobile business applications rather than relying on web applications pays off in improved functionality and productivity, Mr Burkhart argues.

“For the best experience, it is better not to have a web-based version [of the application] but one that is specific, depending on what the user is doing. It is about having right functionality.”

It is not just a question of designing applications so they fit on a mobile device’s smaller screen, he says, but providing the right amount of task-specific information to field-based staff. Too often, re-purposed PC or web applications produce cluttered screens, and frustrated users.

Paying close attention to mobile workers’ needs also pays dividends in industrial and blue-collar applications.

For example, JCDecaux, the outdoor advertising company, developed a field-based app for staff and subcontractors installing billboards and posters. The app allows the installers to photograph when each poster goes up, and provide a GPS location and time stamp via a smartphone.

JCDecaux customers can also view the images, taken by the Windows Mobile devices, in near real time, allowing them to track the roll-out of their campaigns.

The project, developed with PA Consulting and Vodafone, involved fine-tuning settings on the handsets, in particular to boost performance of the onboard camera in poor lighting, so crews do not need conventional cameras and do not have to load images to a PC before sending them to clients.

It is not only custom-built apps being used by business. Chevron, the oil company, is trialling an iPhone-based version of Nimbus Control, a business process management package.

This, says Jim Boots, senior BPM adviser at Chevron, will enable the company to deliver up-to-date process information to staff anywhere around its plants. The vast size of oil refineries puts a strain on conventional IT tools and connectivity. Maintenance engineers, for example, will be able to view the latest guidance on servicing or repairs directly from a device.

Modern smartphones stand out from industrial devices for their ease of use and clear screens. “We have tended to use heavy-duty devices and there are certain requirements for our environment,” says Mr Boots. “But people already use their phones here without wrecking them.”

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MAKING AN APP


Read Alan Cane’s feature on creating a mobile app, plus:

• Apps and marketing;

• Wi-fi and network overload;

• A case for fibre-to-the-home