As one company example shows, enterprise mobile apps are the wave of the future when it comes to employee training — and for good reason. Employee training offered through game apps like those developed by True Office can increase recall of training material — but how?

As Adam Sodowick, CEO of True Office, told PFSK, games delivered via apps help improve employee engagement with traditionally boring training material. This approach plays on problem solving skills and storytelling to help workers grasp “dry material” that’s important for their jobs.

We think these two findings about employee training bring a real issue to the forefront — employees are using their own devices — especially in virtual environments — and they’re increasingly turning to mobile devices and enterprise apps for their work. In fact, the IAAP’s infographic shows that in the next seven years, 71% of workers will use cloud technology to do most of their work.

With all of these factors in mind, mobile application management will play a huge role in delivering training to employees. And training surrounding company policies on BYOD and using mobile device and enterprise apps for work will be added to the list of training requirements.

Questions to consider with mobile application management and employee training:

• Who will own the training on BYOD and mobile app policies?
• Who will train employees on app functionality and support?
• How will employees access training apps?
• How will distributed employees get support and updates?

To learn more about the opportunity and challenges facing enterprises and their employees’ mobility, please catch a recap of our webinar; Understanding Enterprise Mobility.

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With the employee paying for most or all of the costs of the hardware, voice, data services, and associated expenses, companies that embrace BYOD programs can save a lot of money — as much as $80 per month per user, according to CIO.com.

InfoWorld reports that 19,000 of Intel’s 100,000 employees participate in the company’s BYOD program. Intel’s BYOD program has generated $150 million per year in increased productivity (57 extra minutes of work output per day per BYOD employee). Intel receives $3 in returns for every $1 invested in BYOD, or roughly $7,500 per BYOD employee for a cost of $2,500 to enable, manage, and secure each device.

The cost savings and productivity gains that are generated through BYOD efforts can be significant.

Of course, the kind of productivity gains and cost savings achieved by companies like Intel aren’t possible without providing employees with the right mix of enterprise mobile apps. This applies both to larger enterprises such as an Intel or GM as well as small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs). For wide-spread adoption of enterprise mobile apps, your applications must be useful for helping your employees do their jobs effectively.

When employees use enterprise mobile apps for work, they access them in all sorts of places: at their children’s Little League games, in the food court at the mall, in airport lounges, etc. To help protect sensitive corporate data — as well as vulnerable customer data — companies can use mobile application management (MAM).

Mobile application management enables IT to protect enterprise apps and data throughout all phases of the mobile app lifecycle — from development to deployment to app signing to inspection for security flaws and malware — while leaving personal apps and data alone. This level of application management is possible through a zero-touch security model that doesn’t require restrictive mobile device management (MDM) policies while protecting enterprise apps and enterprise data.

Meanwhile, mobile application management can be used to wipe all enterprise mobile apps and corporate data remotely from a lost or stolen device. Given the sensitivity of the data at issue, this is a critical capability. According to the Ponemon Institute, it costs nearly $200 per lost or stolen business record.

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First, the best way for IT to distribute mobile apps is through an enterprise app store. A company that deploys an enterprise app store can save money by controlling which apps employees can download as well as cap the numbers of licenses in use.

Because security is so critical, a company with an enterprise app store can breath easier knowing its workers aren’t downloading apps that can put the business at risk, and an enterprise app store lets IT distribute line of business apps to any mobile device; smartphones, tablets, phablets – and any operating system; Android, iOS, Blackberry.

With an enterprise app store, line of business execs can work with IT to control which employees have access to which line of business app based on their roles in the company. This handles the specifics of which applications can be distributed to, and accessed by, individual employees.

IT can ensure that these role-based enterprise mobile apps give users the features and capabilities as well as the necessary data they need to do their jobs. Employees will jump at the chance to download apps that make the most sense for them and will make their jobs easier – thus ensuring increased productivity and user adoption.

Here’s an example of how a manufacturing company might use role-based enterprise mobile apps:

Each day, service technicians are required to do several different jobs. The service department leaders could determine the five or six of these tasks their technicians absolutely have to do when they’re on the road, such as ordering a small part for a repair job.

These techs don’t need to access the entire, complex application for field service technicians. Rather, all they need is to be able to download one-off apps that are specific to their roles and easy to use.

Role-based enterprise mobile apps can be used for just about any job in any vertical. The key to creating role-based apps employees want to download and use is for line of business leaders to work with IT to analyze their department’s processes and systems so they prioritize the features and capabilities of the various role-based apps.

Doing this will ensure that the company determines the apps that employees – or groups of employees – need to become more productive, thereby improving the efficiency of the business.

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However, because employees continue to download apps for personal use in record numbers, it’s critical for IT to strike a balance between ensuring the privacy of employees’ personal apps and information while applying appropriate safeguards to protect enterprise apps and corporate data.

Combined downloads from the most popular commercial app stores — Apple’s App Store, Google Play, the Windows Phone Marketplace, and BlackBerry World — jumped 11% from the fourth quarter of 2012 through March 2013, according to market research firm Canalys. Meanwhile, enterprise mobile app downloads also continue to occur at a rapid clip. According to Yankee Group, the proportion of companies that have increased their budgets for mobile apps this year has nearly doubled, from 28% to 51%.

As employees continue to download both personal and corporate apps, IT organizations need an effective way to protect the privacy of employees’ personal data while ensuring that enterprise apps, along with proprietary and customer data, are secured.

To read the complete article on Wired Innovation Insights, click here.

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One approach to this problem is mobile device management (MDM), but the problem with MDM is it requires managing a device that belongs to the user. What’s more, containerization at the device level compromises the user experience. A better approach is mobile application management (MAM), which can be applied, as the name implies, at the application level, wrapping corporate apps and data, but not wrapping Facebook or Roku.

This approach provides a high level of administrative control while still offering a superior user experience for all mobile applications, both the wrapped and unwrapped, so to speak…

Read the full article on Network World!

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This is not a strategy to ignore, as customers are increasing their interest in retail mobile apps. According to analytics firm Flurry, Android and iOS users spent 525% more time on retail mobile apps in December 2012 as they did in the prior year, while in 2012, consumers spent 27% of their app time on retail apps (up from 15% in 2011). For the retailers who can leverage the mobile medium effectively, the sky is the limit.

Retail enterprise mobile apps can run the gamut from consumer-facing apps that drive foot traffic and increase purchases to employee productivity apps that help salespeople increase their effectiveness on the floor. For brick and mortar retailers, driving foot traffic is imperative, and leveraging mobile devices to access their consumers can make it happen.

According to Mobile Marketer, 44% of all restaurant and retail mobile ad campaigns include a store locator. This location-based component not only encourages users to go into the store but removes barriers from doing so; the information is right there.

Once in the store, engaging customers to drive purchases is the next key goal for brick and mortar retailers. Price is one way the retailer can connect with the customer — for example, Walmart has a price checker app which allows customers to get prices and stock information about products.

Enterprise mobile apps can help shoppers choose coordinating products while the retailer is happy to upsell. For example, J. Crew’s new mobile app helps customers to find matching products and then requests the help of a sales assistant once they are ready.

For retailers such as Walgreens and CVS, utility is a strong component of their mobile apps, which allow users to request prescription refills to pick up at the store and to get deals.

Lastly, putting apps in the hands of retail employees can enable them to sell more and provide a better customer experience — Apple store employees can conduct an entire purchase experience via handheld devices coordinated across multiple employees, while many mobile solution vendors are introducing apps that leverage location-based data to help salespeople optimize their activities on the sales floor.

Using apps that provide stock availability information or styling suggestions can help the salesperson drive up a consumers’ total transaction value, such as in Sephora’s mobile app, which enables the salesperson to scan a customer’s skin and recommend the optimal matching colors and products.

The possibilities seem endless, however 30% of the top 100 US retailers do not have a mobile app for iOS or Android. Clearly, if your organization can effectively tap into the power of enterprise mobile apps, you will have an advantage over your competitors.

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Before developing a BYOD strategy, IT has to determine the specific goal of the strategy is as well what it’s looking to protect. The goal for most enterprises is to enable their employees to be more productive as well as to protect sensitive corporate data.

Research firm Gartner Inc. agrees, “IT’s best strategy to deal with the rise of BYOD is to address it with a combination of policy, software, infrastructure controls and education in the near term, and with application management and appropriate cloud services in the longer term,” according to a recent Gartner report.

With a mobile application management strategy, IT can be sure that corporate data is encrypted on the device, and that users can’t copy and paste into or out of the app. Additionally, IT can wipe the device of corporate data on demand, but not interfere with the user’s personal information.

Here’s the deal about BYOD and MAM: it’s about connection and communication — how a particular device works with everything and everyone in the organization, not vice versa.

Using mobile application management software tools, IT can develop, test, deploy and control in-house and third-party mobile apps. Not only that, but employees can also download and use IT-approved and provisioned mobile apps from their companies’ enterprise app store.

Mobile application management also lets companies wrap fine-grained security policies around individual mobile apps to add multiple layers of protection to any app that needs more security.

This app wrapping lets enterprises secure sensitive data by wrapping each of the third-party apps that they want to allow to access corporate resources. Then they can deploy those wrapped mobile applications to their enterprise app stores so employees can download them, knowing they’re as secure as possible. IT can also control who has access to which apps, depending on an employee’s job function, among other factors, even though it no longer has control over the device.

The fact is that the use of smartphones, tablets and even phablets (a tablet that also functions as a phone), is only going to increase. That means there will be even more pressure on IT to implement a workable BYOD strategy. It also means that IT must turn to mobile application management tools to turn the strategic vision of BYOD into a successful reality.

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In a word: No.

That’s because if you distribute your app on the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, or Microsoft’s Windows Store it will become publicly available. Not only that, but mobile apps downloaded from public app stores disrupt IT security, as well as application and procurement strategies, according to Ian Finley, research vice president at Gartner Inc.

The fact is that IT departments can’t really control their mobile enterprise apps if they distribute them via cloud-based, public app stores. And if they support public app stores, they also have no way of knowing what other, potentially harmful, apps mobile workers are downloading.

But that’s not all.
In today’s world of BYOD (bring your own device), enterprises have to be vigilant about protecting their corporate networks and the information contained in these networks. Mobile application management is key to managing and securing internal mobile enterprise apps — a challenge with public app stores.

One of the best ways to achieve manageable applications is via app wrapping, a security solution that automatically wraps fine-grained security policies around individual mobile apps. With app wrapping, enterprises can secure sensitive data by wrapping each of the third-party apps that they want to allow to access corporate resources. But the problem is, IT can’t wrap security and policy around mobile apps in a public app store.

To ensure that level of security, IT departments have turned to enterprise app stores to manage their enterprise apps on mobile devices. By 2017, 25% of enterprises will have an enterprise app store, according to Gartner.

“Enterprise app stores promise greater control over the apps used by employees, greater control over software expenditures and greater negotiating leverage with app vendors, but this greater control is only possible if the enterprise app store is widely adopted,” Finley says, adding an enterprise app store has to offer a large variety of apps to be successful because users won’t adopt enterprise app stores if they don’t have access to a lot of apps.

And when they’re successful, enterprise app stores can increase the value of the apps while reducing the associated risks, license fees and administration expenses, he says.

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