Predictions for 2017 – Where is Enterprise Mobility Headed?

The new year is around the corner and as we look back at 2016 it was an exciting year for the enterprise mobility market, full of noteworthy developments that powered fascinating projects and signal more dynamic times ahead.

2016 Enterprise Mobility Trends

• Enterprises and organizations are building and deploying more apps for workers  – the mean number of enterprise apps is now over 35
• Enterprise “apps that matter” can have a profound impact on organizational effectiveness and are being deployed in all departments
• Enterprise mobile apps come from many, many sources – internal development teams, external app developers, ISVs, etc
• Targeted “workers” are now far broader than just employees and BYOD (bring your own device) users – ie. extended enterprise workers like contractors, agents, dealers and more
• Organizations are realizing the strengths and limitations of traditional MDM-based deployment options and benefits of standalone MAM offerings to reach unmanaged devices

These trends have been observed when looking across all industries and show that the number of mobile apps within organizations and the people using them for business purposes is increasing. In a recent webinar we hosted, Adam Bookman from Propelics and Apperian’s Mark Lorion shared their predictions for where enterprise mobility is headed in 2017, below are the top 3.

Top 3 Predictions for Enterprise Mobility in 2017

1. CIOs will attempt to deter the “Wild West of Mobile App Development” The “Wild West” refers to the fact that many organizations have mobile apps that came from different sources that use different reference architectures and processes. This is because at the beginning everyone wanted a mobile app and across different departments and teams there was no standards in place to follow. This causes a lot of headaches for IT around the support and maintenance of mobile apps so we predict there will be a strong effort behind getting standards, governance, and best practices for mobile app development in place. This will not slow down the number of apps being built but rather streamline and enable more people to build apps because they will be equipped with the knowledge and resources to do so.

2. Complexity of Mobile Apps Will Increase When companies begin to put in place mobility initiatives they tend to start with simple mobile apps around expense reports, employee directories or off-the-shelf apps like Salesforce. While these are a fine place to start and often offer quick wins and get people comfortable with the idea of mobile apps for work, in order for mobile apps to permeate into core business processes, they will become more complex. As the size of mobile app initiatives increase organizations will be forced to modernize their legacy processes. Adopting a “mobile-first” mindset will lead to much higher ROIs than any peripheral mobile app in the enterprise could realize.

3. Increased Experimentation with Emerging Technologies Mobile apps are acting as a gateway to emerging technologies and as companies mature and become comfortable with mobile app development, they begin to experiment with new emerging technologies. Such technologies include Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive and machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, artificial intelligence and bots. We feel the 2017 will be a year of experimentation with these technologies while IT attempts to determine and define viable use cases within their organizations.

Download the 2017 Executive Enterprise Mobility Report examines key mobile trends year over year, describes drivers of success, and concludes with recommendations for expanding enterprise mobility programs.