For a decade we've been hailing the ascendance of mobile for business, celebrating CIOs who can spell "4G", and waving the victory banner high above every technology project that extends beyond an Ethernet port. I know. I've stitched many banners.
What I didn't realize is we've been hanging the wrong banners over the wrong projects. In a world where more than a quarter of all human beings own a smartphone (heck, there are 300 million more mobile devices than people), mobile data traffic is increasing by 50% every year, and more than 50 billion apps have been downloaded from Apple's App Store, it should come as no surprise that stuff we do at work is every bit as mobile as stuff we do at play. It wasn't until this week that I realized how absurd it is to tout mobile projects when in fact the only ones that are notable today are immobile.
Brad, CIO at a healthcare company in Ohio, told me something that brought a tear to my eye:
"I don't want to see my team at a desk. That means they're not in the field solving problems for customers."That's banner-worthy. That's something I've been waiting to hear since first using a Nextel i1000 two-way radio with a WAP browser and receiving alerts via Push Proxy Gateway on the iDEN network (trust me, worse than walking to school in the snow uphill both ways). Brad's comment is profound because it wasn't in the context of mobile anything. It implied that his team's mobile devices and the user experience on them are fully-capable extensions of what they do on other devices.
The mobile enterprise is dead. Mobile projects are dead. There are now only business projects supported by technology that is available everywhere.
Brad's leadership is rare. In fact, all but a few IT organizations feel compelled to distinguish mobile from immobile initiatives. The numbers back that up: enterprise spend on mobile applications in 2013 is a paltry 3% of the $342 billion that will be spent on all enterprise software (source: IDC). The holy triumvirate of mobile, social, and cloud are changing that fast but the only end state that matters is when all technology projects are inherently mobile.
All of which makes today's ServiceNow mobility announcement significant beyond any of its features. It's mobile user experiences like what we're introducing as part of the latest release that make it possible for Brad to usher in the post-mobile enterprise era.The smartphone and tablet web apps represent deliberate mobile-first design. They gave us the opportunity to build years of listening to and learning from customers into a user experience like none we've offered before. Every screen, pixel, and line of code was scrutinized to fit the mobile lifestyles of our customers. Every design session was an opportunity to channel the needs of all the mobile personas we target: business users, field technicians, managers, system administrators, and executives.
New features introduced in the smartphone web app include:
•Self-service capabilities like a redesigned mobile Service Catalog and Knowledge Base
•Support for client-side workflow including UI policies and client scripts
•A full platform integration that automatically makes custom applications available in the smartphone navigator
•A Personal Tasks app designed to showcase mobile-first features like one-click task creation and UI actions embedded in lists
•Stream views of forms with continuous scrolling and auto-refresh for news feed-style collaboration
This is just a start. Upgrade to the latest ServiceNow release, bask in the glow of mobile nirvana on your iOS or Android smartphone, and let me know what you think.
The mobile enterprise is dead. We helped kill it. And the next banner I'll be waving has Brad's handsome mug… and his fist crushing a Nextel i1000.
