If there is one truth out there for the mobile enterprise, it is that there is no one real truth out there. The rate of growth and transformation associated with the smart technology ecosystem is simply growing too fast for companies to keep up with.
The advice a specific approach to preparing for changes that will happen tomorrow differs profoundly based on who you are talking to. We see it daily as wave after wave of conflicting philosophies are communicated to us as companies within the industry position their products in the marketplace.
And even though we see mountains of data and industry insight, we don’t have the answers. The only truth we can tell you is that you need to have a mindset towards flexibility, so you have the ability to rapidly adopt new technologies as they enter the mainstream.
Take Apple Pay for instance. It has the prospect of fundamentally changing how people pay for products and services – at least for those with Apple phones (and only the most recent phones). But what about the rest of your customers? Google has had an NFC based payment option (Google Wallet) for some time now, but it never gained any traction. Perhaps Apple Pays success will drive adoption of Google Wallet, as recently seen by Walt Disney World’s acceptance of both payment options at their flagship park. Or perhaps not, and neither payment option will see long term adoption by consumers and the marketplace.
The best thing you can do is to keep up with emerging trends and identify how they fit in your specific situation. This time of year provides a great opportunity to do just that and this month we have published several predictions for 2015.
One viewpoint that you might particularly want to pay attention to is for technology related to the mobile rich application, which has the ability to take advantage of the smart technology and operating system in ways that mobile web implementations simply cannot. To provide some clarity upon the subject, Phunware has published the white paper: Tomorrows Mobile Applications Today: Drive Your Organization Forward with Next-Generation Technology.
The
publication looks beyond the current approach many companies are taking of pushing old paradigms to a new technology medium – basically attempting to fit a square peg into a round hole – offering basic re-designs of their current technology experience without leveraging the unique aspects of the mobile rich app to provide real utility and value to consumers.
For example, the Phunware report cites a recent study by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The study examined the mobile app functionality of more than 43,000 health-related applications available on the Apple App Store, including those for consumer and clinical use. The IMS found the majority of the mobile applications to be lacking anything but the most basic functionality, with over 90 percent of the apps scoring less than 40 out of a possible 100 for functionality based on 25 screening factors.
While two-thirds of the healthcare applications studied could display information, only half of those could also provide instructions, and just 20 percent could track or capture user-entered data. Amazingly, only around three percent of the applications included higher level functionality, such as an alert tool. This lack of utilization of the functionality of smart devices is especially enlightening, as it points to the healthcare sector’s struggles in identifying how to integrate and utilize new smart technology.
You can read the entire analysis by going to the Phunware website and
downloading the white paper.