Mobile mindset: Having a mobile-first culture and skillset

A truly digital organisation starts with a digital mindset which is reflected in every aspect of their business processes, technology and culture. Today, it is imperative that mobile leads in defining this digital mindset, especially in the Asia Pacific where smartphone adoption rates are skyrocketing, making this one of the largest mobile markets in the world.

According to the Statistica website¹, there were about 1.9 billion mobile Internet users in the Asia Pacific in 2018. The mobile Internet user penetration rate was 45%, and the figure has been forecast to reach 62% in 2025.

Mobility is about enjoying connectivity, the ability to work on the go, the immediate customer experience and getting an instant response or instant access to information.

While digital transformation encompasses different technologies, developing a mobile mindset and deploying effective mobile apps will be critical to success.

However, the transformation process involves much more than the creation of customer-centric mobile apps. More fundamentally, the success of mobile-first digital transformation hinges on the creation of a mobile-first culture within the organisation.

Organisations will have to ask themselves: Do they truly embrace a world of work, leisure and communication powered by mobile for its customers, employees, and partners?

Some organisations treat mobility as a separate channel that serves a specific function such as marketing or communications. Some regard it as an add-on to their “main” enterprise computing strategy based around desktops or notebooks. Some have mobility existing in the realm of shadow IT, a parallel environment within the organisation.

These mindsets perpetuate silos that create barriers to functionality and access, resulting in a fragmentation of the user experience across different end-point devices. And they represent the antithesis of what a mobile-first approach entails.

A mobile-first digital transformation strategy requires a pervasive, holistic approach that will enable the organisation to remove silos in IT management and operations and deliver the convenience and responsiveness of “business anywhere” as well as frictionless communications.

With an up-and-coming generation of mobile-only individuals that will surf, shop, share and veritably live their lives on their mobile phones, tablets and watches, a mobile-first digital transformation strategy will have to be geared towards providing the best possible experience across all these devices. For example, it will have to address user expectations that applications and services will work more or less the same way regardless of the device they are using.

The good news is that technological barriers to this have been falling with the emergence of communications, management and security application programming interfaces, rise of multiplatform development tools and the ability of the HTML standard and browsers to allow rich applications to be developed across all browsers.

These capabilities, together with rapid development platforms and methodologies, enable organisations to focus not on specific devices but on developing desired functionalities and deploying them quickly across the organisation’s universe of end points.

In a mobile-first business, it should be possible to have all these managed by a single team.

There will still be a need for technical specialists who understand the capabilities and limitations of different computing platforms and web browsers within the organisation’s IT environment, just as there will be a need for domain specialists who understand the variations in roles and requirements that impact the policies governing device usage.

The difference is that all this knowledge will segue into a unified process based on the use of common technologies, policies, standards and teams regardless of device or platform. This is significant because it provides the foundation for the organisation to tap on new, emerging capabilities - next-generation technologies and developments such as the Internet of Things, big data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

Take, for example, the unprecedented access to data and analytics that is enabled by mobility and parallel developments in IoT. A mobile-first foundation will help ensure that relevant insights are delivered more seamlessly to the hands of the right people at the right time so that organisations can make faster, better business decisions that improve performance and boost customer and user satisfaction.

As organisations look towards digital transformation, it is important to keep in mind that mobility has to play a central role. And a mobile-first digital transformation has to be catalysed first and foremost by a mobile-first culture, guided by a mobile-first strategy, and realised through the right technologies, tools and skillsets.

¹ Mobile internet user penetration in APAC 2018-2025