How to Address Operational Challenges of Your Organization With Enterprise Mobility Explore how micro apps and app refactoring can help overcome the operational challenges of large-scale organizations

Large-scale enterprises have a few things in common. A large enterprise has its business footprint across geographies. It employs a workforce representing diverse cultures, languages, and age groups and complies with numerous local laws. The complexities multiply when an enterprise has to manage multiple business units, branches, and teams.

Taking speedy decisions gets difficult for CIOs due to the sheer size and complexity of the enterprise. A slight miscalculation or business IT alignment (BITA) misstep results in adverse, enterprise-wide impact, financial losses, and reputation damage.

Importance of Digitalisation

Today's enterprises have to tackle some new difficulties too. Your organisation, perhaps, is no exception. Difficulties range from changing regulatory environment, disruptive competition from start-ups, and rising expectations of the digitally empowered consumers. Given these realities, the only way an enterprise can take these challenges head-on is by embracing digitalisation.

The advancements in technology have mandated that companies have 'digital' in their business DNA. For instance, mobility, one of the key pillars of digitalisation, can be harnessed to achieve productivity and efficiency goals while delivering a seamless user experience.

A few forward-thinking organisations have succeeded in delivering great user experience by making their internal-only processes available to customers. The self-service portals by financial services and e-commerce players, for instance, provide a wider choice to customers and also reduce the operational strain on these organisations. Let's explore how digitalisation can yield greater operational efficiencies.

Stop Generating Reports

One time-consuming activity commonly found across departments of a large enterprise is report generation. From accounts to HR to sales to warehousing to manufacturing-nobody loves it but does it, nevertheless. Report generation hampers productivity and clogs network bandwidth-these reports are shared with everyone as email attachments. At another level, it also makes life difficult for the analytics teams who have to make sense of massive unstructured data.

Providing relevant and well-designed app dashboards to every person may nullify these issues in one clean swipe. Sharing reports can merely be app based comments without having to send email attachments. The organisation can accrue huge time savings and free up its valuable resources for productive assignments.

Make Your HR Truly Empowering

The corporate HR is supposed to play an empowering role. However, burdened by operational difficulties, the HR often struggles to turn its programmes effective. Take an example of on-boarding of new recruits and induction training. Given the multi-geographic nature of a large organisation, it is challenging (and expensive) to conduct onboarding and training sessions across time zones and locations. Ensuring that every new recruit attends these sessions is another challenge. Measuring the effectiveness of training-whether the employee has fully grasped the training content or not-is yet another difficulty. With the help of a modern, container app architecture, you can address these issues effectively.

Container app architecture can allow your corporate HR to push the on-boarding and training content to every recruit's smartphone in the form of a web app. In this approach, a container app is the only app an employee has to download and install. Every next app that your organisation introduces, such as an onboarding and training app, displays inside a user's container automatically. As employees don't have to search for the newly introduced apps and since these apps can work across devices, screen sizes and OS platforms, a near 100 percent user adoption is guaranteed.

You may extend this approach even to your product training needs. As training becomes easily accessible-from anywhere, anytime, and via any device-more sales, presales and service executives can benefit from it. Deeper product knowledge optimises the time invested in answering customer queries and improves customer satisfaction.

An App for Every Soul

Digital transformation can be achieved in totality when your organisation delivers the benefits of digitalisation down to the last man-internal or external. This may include supplier-employees, carrying and forwarding agents, warehousing executives, field salespersons, channel sales executives, distribution partners, event management teams, security guards, and even drivers.

Giving specially developed apps to these executives can help your organisation bring about transformational changes to their roles. The secret lies in splitting a large business process into several tiny tasks and developing a micro-app for each task. Being focused on a specific task only, a micro-app is simple to use and requires zero training.

A logistics company, for example, may build a micro-app with local language support just for its truck drivers. The app can deliver speedy reimbursements to drivers covering their on-road costs like tolls, parking, and refreshments without them having to fill up vouchers. Similarly, a hotel chain can build a micro-app for its orderlies and drivers to facilitate timely airport pickups.

Accelerate Your Digitalisation Journey

Every large-scale organisation usually has some enterprise applications running. The IT leadership in collaboration with an experienced digital strategy partner can identify the good features of such applications and convert them into micro apps. App refactoring expedites your legacy modernisation effort as citizen developers can build APIs without touching the code base of the existing web app. Thus they can develop mobile apps by working directly on an application's HTML layer.

For the tasks not covered by the existing applications, you may consider customising ready app templates from enterprise mobility vendors with a proven digital transformation track record.

Lastly, it's commonly argued that the traditional IT teams of large enterprises take a long time to serve a new request, such as building and rollout of apps, generation of reports, API development, integrations, etc. Critics claim that bigger the organisation, slower it gets. The best option for you to avoid such risky scenario is to identify the right digital transformation partner who can help you infuse innovative ideas into your operations with speed.