Cisco's Lessons for Mobile App Empowerment

The way Cisco methodically increased productivity and " effectiveness of your sales staff with a range of content and applications development reinforces the fundamental lesson of enterprise mobility: the correct solution will harvest or home - evolved, there has bought off the shelf .
To accomplish this, you must imitate the technology providers and improve their skills in product design and management, "the art of understanding the users and processing solutions to meet your needs. This is exactly what Cisco has made.

In a couple of other stories , I'm defending myself that companies must treat methodically to find the right set of content and applications for each segment of employees. ( For a review of my suggested See "Using mobile technology to find its way to business transformation " approach " Why CIOs need data and analysis to make Mobile a success " for a discussion of the role that an data analysis can play in understanding the behavior of the user. )

To make the minimum number of experiments for the least amount of time and money to produce the greatest amount of information. In practice, this means understanding a theory of mobility for your business and the risks associated with making content available to understand what people need, the care of the collections of applications and content, and ultimately, increase productivity through the release of a number of increasingly sophisticated applications.

Of course, this effort must be based on a better understanding of how mobile technology can help your business. This is where design and product management skills are crucial.The example of Cisco's efforts to increase your sales through mobile technology provides a powerful example of this experimental method and as an internal team for all purposes has become the designer and product manager.

 User Research from the Chairman’s Club

 Cisco realized that mobile devices are critical from the outset, and in 2009 began a BYOD policy throughout the company. This step, the second in my schedule is key, as the basis for the realization of the experiments that work.

Director of Strategic Initiatives Sales Enablement, and Cisco said it currently has 100 applications distributed over 70,000 managed devices. At first, like most companies, Cisco offers e-mail, calendar and contacts. Once this was in the hands of the employees, the next desire was expressed as systems communicate with web conferencing and instant messaging. For Cisco, this meant the distribution of their products WebEx and Jabber on mobile devices. Provide the catalogs of applications for providers of existing applications are the fourth step in the roadmap, Cisco runs the third leg, to provide content at a later time.

At this point, Cisco jumped on the last leg of my road map, with native applications that are built to order. The cost of the creation of such applications and the difficulty of tinkering with them, means should be undertaken only after a company is sure that you understand what functionality is needed. In my road map, this is the last step, which is preceded by the taking of evidence, providing web applications, content and construction.

Cisco said felt comfortable moving to the right to a native application, first for iOS and Android, as it had two main channels for searching for users. The first was the president of the Club, the annual celebration of the best. In this case, the main sales team is asked what they need to do their job better. In addition, the group also performs investigations periodically ask users what they want.
The message has been received loud and clear. Sales people felt themselves to be held in two ways: first, it took too long to get the approval of non-standard offers, or discounts. Second, the sales staff needed a way to monitor the status of orders so that customers can receive real-time information on when they got what they bought.

The application has proved very popular, although said that Cisco has yet to determine a tough financial ROI for your application. "When someone picks up the tablet to a large public meeting and says, 'I love this app', I suppose we should be helping in a big way.

The application has been updated twice since the initial launch, adding the ability to see real-time reservations and therefore the ability to schedule virtual engineering resources.

"The net effect of this application is that we can move faster and answer questions for customers immediately,. He said that 9,000 members of the 15,000 sales staff are using the application, and increasingly mobile is the preferred method to approve deal.

Product Management and the App Fridge

Brett Belding , Senior Manager Mobility Services , Cisco, is responsible for the distribution and management of the portfolio of Cisco 100 applications. Belding said the vehicle for distribution was driven AppFridge Apperian , which is necessary to avoid having to use public app store as a distribution method . Furthermore, Apperian offers more features for managing the lifecycle of applications and distribution of applications, such as the ability to wrap the applications security policies and the narrow use governing how they are used and who uses. With the success of AppFridge , Cisco is now in the process of launching a larger, more general electronics store.

Belding said the concept of a Cisco -centric store was crucial for approval. "People know that if an application is AppFridge the application is of high quality and it is important to do the job," said Belding . Each application AppFridge is supported by Cisco and passes through experience and review title .In addition, the beta AppFridge allows testing for the initial assessment and to monitor in detail how to use the application. McKittrick is a user experience expert team to help with these assessments and to improve the design of native applications.

"In a world in which there are 900,000 apps in Apple's App Store , the role of curation is crucial," said Belding . Future directions include Cisco Cure - specific role and expand the procurement process and the only logon account for third-party applications , which provide a way forward for mashups of many different mobile applications.

Belding said focusing on the provision of specific collections of content, which is the third step in my schedule ,applications are also included in the catalog.

The Lessons from Cisco’s Mobile Deployment

An advantage of this experimental approach is that it makes who is leading the implementation of mobility in a product manager who seeks to study the people being served. When the management practices of the product are transferred to other IT domains, and often improve performance.It 'clear that the effective use of applications is the engine of productivity. Curation is vital and custom applications can be transformational. But the most important lesson is that the success of Cisco's mobility comes from a deep understanding of what they want their users. Cisco uses many different existing processes for obtaining this knowledge, as a result was able to accelerate the creation of a native application that fact great . In addition, Cisco maintains a strong focus on ease of search. The companies that mimic the obsession with Cisco Monitoring and understanding your users get the most out of mobile technology.