Mobile is now becoming a mission-critical service for all businesses. CIOs must support mobile moments, which Forrester defines as points in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what they want in their immediate context. Mobile moments have spread well beyond consumer scenarios:

  • Your business customers are demanding them. Mobile engagement is critical for all customer relationships and better user experiences – irrespective of whether you are a business user or a consumer. Consumerization has changed this distinction forever. Today, we all expect a great experience – both at home and at work.
  • Your partners and suppliers are working on adjusting their business processes. To ensure smooth end-to-end workflows in these new processes, you need to ensure that your own organization adjusts to their mobile mind shift. Moreover, any mobile offering that depends on an ecosystem of partners relies on end-to-end experiences. Third-party providers can provide productivity improvements for collaboration and workflow efficiency to help with this.
  • Your competitors are exploiting the opportunities that mobility offers. Mobility is quickly becoming one of the most important battlegrounds for business innovation. Your competitors are readjusting and improving their business processes through mobility. Every CIO should have a clear strategy for a world in which every customer, worker, and supplier is hyper-productive, hyper-available, and hyper-engaged.

When looking at mobile moments in the B2B arena, your main focus should be business process improvement. Ensuring a great user experience and user delight are key, of course, but business process efficiency should be the main focus for the CIO. Your goal is to help the business user complete a specific task in the most efficient manner. Being able to deliver great mobile moments will also enhance your brand as an innovative industry leader and partner.

I therefore see the mobile mind shift in the B2B context less as a technology issue and more as a change and transition project. Ultimately, the B2B mobile mind shift is about changing the nature of your engagement with business customers and partners. Irrespective of where your organization is on the mobile evolution curve, the future will be similar for all businesses.

My report, The B2B Mobile Mind Shift Changes The Way Businesses Collaborate, investigates these themes and assists CIOs in developing a mobile strategy for business customers.