Riding the Tide of Mobile Knowledge Management
Knowledge is like water; it wants to flow. Today’s bring-your-own-device/bring-your-own-app (BYOD/BYOA) work environments are more porous than ever. Knowledge now has more outlets, more fissures in the enterprise landscape through which to seep. If you can effectively ride the tide to manage the flow of information across these new tributaries—making the right information ubiquitously accessible to the right people, in a context of business action—you can effectively “raise the IQ” of your entire organization.
Industry research firm Gartner has predicted that by 2017, at least 50% of all employers will require employees to provide their own mobile devices for work purposes. Gartner says that, “Enterprises that offer only corporate-liable programs will soon be the exception.” In fact, we don’t need to wait until 2017 to feel the impact of BYOD. A June, 2013, survey from research firm Ovum found that 70% of employees who own a smartphone or tablet use it to access corporate data today.
With the enterprise mobility phenomenon already in full swing, more IT departments are starting to think about how they can help the business uncover new digital revenue streams, increase front-line customer engagement and drive better collaboration within the enterprise to accelerate the decision cycle of “awareness-knowledge-action” (AKA).
Accelerating AKA for Better Business Results
Faster cycles of AKA are key to making smarter business decisions AND rapidly operationalizing those decisions. These are two sides of the same coin because intelligence with no action yields no better result than ill-informed business action. The business demand for better technology solutions to sense, understand and respond to market stimuli is staggering. Consider the numbers from Gartner, which estimates that business process management (BPM) as a $2.5 billion market, gives $1 billion to enterprise social, $6.7 billion to customer relationship management (CRM), and $9.5 billion to application development related to the previous three. That’s a grand total of $19.7 billion.
These market segments all chase the same goal—namely, managing information to drive peak customer experience through:
Awareness. Identifying an issue before loss of revenue or public crisis;
Knowledge. Capturing the right data, in context, from across the enterprise; and
Action. Enabling staff (and customers)—no matter where they are—to take action and collaborate in real time, to solve issues and create new opportunities.
The quest to manage the flow of information across all outlets and accelerate the AKA cycle is yielding several interesting technology and work-style developments. These include:
The “fully-engaged worker.” Being “engaged” has typically had a dual meaning. You are engaged in the work process with the devices you use (smartphone, tablet, desktop), but you also engage with your co-workers, suppliers and clients—the people in your business circles—to get the best results for the job at hand. Today, those two meanings are converging, as technology and social media come together more closely than ever before. Consider the problem-solving power for your organization when all the people who touch a piece of work can get instant alerts and updates on problem resolution, on whichever device they’re using at the time. They can take action themselves, escalate it to another team member, or just keep tabs on what’s being done. And that’s not just inside your business. That same power can be available to everyone in the supply chain.
Enterprise social networks tied directly to work. Business social networks have suffered from a reputation that they really have nothing to do with the work that keeps a company competitive. Today, as an extension of the fully engaged worker, enterprise social networks are evolving to unite workers’ ad hoc collaborations into the context of their business operations. This focuses social network attention toward company priorities, and even allows for a “crowdsourcing” of quick, repeatable solutions to issues that would otherwise cost companies time, customers and revenue.
Better mobile apps without coding. Expensive and time-consuming coding for business applications is giving way to a new approach to software design. Increasing numbers of development teams are using new types of development platforms that make building apps as easy as assembling pre-built components in a visual designer. These drag-and-drop business solutions are “write once, deploy everywhere,” eliminating the burden of individual development and maintenance across various desktop and mobile platforms.
A New Approach for a New World of Mobile Information
The trends above highlight three keys to managing the flow of information in a mobile environment for business value. The first is simply reaching the experts and decision-makers required, wherever they may be. The second is effectively tying mobile device use to the data and processes that drive the business. The third is rapidly and cost-effectively provisioning and maintaining a growing universe of mobile apps.A new concept—the BPM-driven enterprise application platform—is revolutionizing the dissemination and use of enterprise knowledge on the desktop and on mobile devices. This new type of development platform addresses all three of the key criteria. Pioneered by companies (such as Appian), these platforms simplify every step in securely provisioning and using new apps that spread enterprise data for action, within the context of business policies and procedures.
An application author designs and configures a new application at an abstract level, writing very little code. Once the application is complete, it can be published to any device, desktop or mobile, and run natively with the same functionality. If the platform is hosted in the cloud (as an application platform-as-a-service), upgrades across all user platforms are automatic and hands-free. Security issues are inherently addressed by the platform (network encryption, minimal data storage on the device, passcode locking, etc.). Because such a platform is routed in business process management, the resulting applications treat both process and data as first-class citizens, keeping the two in lock-step for the attainment of business goals.
Making the Case for BPM
A BPM-based enterprise application platform is essential for managing the flow of information across the enterprise, its value chain and the variety of access points in use today. Delivering accurate, quality data from systems of record to knowledge workers—in the office, or on-the-go—provides the foundation for adaptive case management, effective business processes and enterprise collaboration. The result is faster and smarter actions by customer-facing employees, increased collaboration and productivity across the organization, and holistic visibility into the overall health of the business for executives. Empowering the workforce to accelerate the AKA cycle delivers the speed and agility required to turn enterprise knowledge into business value in our increasingly-mobile world of work.