For this year’s Build IT Together event, we were fortunate to have President of Kalamazoo-based Maestro, Jen Randall, come and speak in one of our sessions. Unfortunately, for confidentiality reasons, we are not able to publish the video of her speaking onto our site. That just means you’ll have to come to the event next year so you don’t miss out on any info! Below is a summary of her talk.
Not if, but when…
Through the use of technology and mobile devices, people are now able to find answers to their questions quicker than ever before. Going mobile seems to be inevitable, and Jen gave us all sorts of facts and figures to illustrate that, including:
- the number of mobile devices has exceeded the number of people on earth
- people are connected to their mobile devices about 50% of the time
- 80% of users do not leave home without their phone
- this year, mobile phones are expected to overtake PCS as the most common device to access the web
- 1.3 billion workers will be mobile in 2015
Benefits & Barriers
For many, the benefit is just being able to access resources wherever and whenever. Some use tools to increase their knowledge of particular subjects through quizzing or other studying apps. Going mobile can improve performance and provide information whenever necessary, combating the ‘forgetting curve’ (which is basically what it sounds like: the low percentage of what you actually retain from presentations, books, etc. as time goes on).
Despite these benefits, there is certainly still apprehension in the marketplace to go mobile, key barriers being:
- budget constraints
- security concerns
- lack of IT infrastructure
- difficult to integrate into legacy systems
- legal or policy concerns
Going mobile
Maestro goes through three stages when assisting a client: find, build, respond. They first try and find out exactly what their clients need and attempt to get to the root cause of their challenges. Afterward, they spend time in the planning phase, followed by figuring out how to measure the success of the app.
Regardless of barriers, Jen said the “answer for mobile is absolutely.” However, she wasn’t advocating that businesses just rush into things.
“There is an entire continuum that needs to be considered as you’re thinking about going mobile,” she said.
In the last few years, $10 billion was spent in mobile technology and a whopping 70% of that has been wasted because of poor planning and insight. So, while it’s important to recognize the inevitability of going mobile, I urge you to not wind up as part of that 70%!
