Developing Apps For Enterprise

Mobile applications are becoming increasingly important for big business. Companies are now using mobile versions of traditional software systems and some are even developing their own mobile apps to provide solutions for their companies. Mobile first is a mindset we all need to be thinking about, considering the world is using their mobiles more than their desktops.

Recently, I was invited to participate in a strategy session for an international construction company.

The brief was to create a mobile first workflow that will provide management with data from the field and the reporting required to make decisions in real time.

I was asked to join a small team of eight people as a result of SafetyCulture's focus on building mobile first technology for enterprises. Also because iAuditor has been able to engage front line workers at a new level, by empowering them with a tool that doesn’t require an IT team or large budget to get up and running.

Creating a mobile first workflow

The session started out mapping the scenarios that the work flow would need to cover. Essential steps, such as conducting an audit, and reporting on the findings result. Then additional scenarios were added, such as finding a hazard and creating an action item when only a walk through was taking place and no actual audit was being conducted.

So far so good, and it all seemed pretty straight forward but gradually over the course of a couple of hours, complexity started to creep in, and as more considerations were added, so were more edge cases, such as tracking the frequency of managers at each site so their activity levels can be reported. At this point our likelihood of a focused simple app was slipping away.

This process sounded familiar and it reminded me of any one of our many product meetings inside SafetyCulture.

We often start off with a simple brief, and then by the end of planning session we have what is known as, "scope creep”, where end up trying to build the Battle Star Galactica, complete with lasers guns on the ready and hyperspace “light speed” mode.

The challenge from this point, is to use the 80/20 rule. Whatever we build will never be perfect for 100% of use cases. But it needs to cover 80% of them. It requires both, a crystal clear vision on what the end goal is, and secondly, a discipline to constantly eliminate what is considered as feature creep.

“The challenge from this point is to use the 80/20 rule.”

An app is designed to do very few things, extremely well. That is what makes an app so engaging. It is pure, it is focused, and it gives you want you want very quickly. A user on a phone only has a small amount of screen real estate, and that means the app needs to always understand their intention and then deliver the outcome with as fewer steps as possible.

Shaping the scope

Now, back to the meeting: To be fair, an early stage planning session should be an open ideas fest. No idea is too crazy or too bold. The challenge and it’s more of an art than a science, is to then shape the scope back to a very succinct experience for the end user.

So after a couple of hours in, we needed to revisit the goals that we set out with.

1. Create a mobile data collection workflow for safety and quality that will be embraced by field teams.
2. Collate that data into a central repository to generate reports.

Outcomes of the session

The best thing about having a team of people in a session like this, is that you get lots of ideas. The worst thing is that you also get lots of fears and opinions that can come with those ideas.

One of the ideas from the session the team liked, was the ability to share information easily. They wanted to have information shared across teams, so that if an issue was found on one location, then it could be shared with other sites.

There was already a system for sharing certain types of incident information at this company and currently each report is moderated before the moderator decides on what can be released company wide. One of the strategy team members was fearful that if the app allowed free sharing, all sorts of “inappropriate" content could be distributed. 

Immediately, the group started to imagine of the types of “selfies” guys on construction sites may come up with, and there was a very reasonable consensus to continue to moderate all content.

OK, now this was the critical stage of the meeting. As everyone quietly nodded in agreement that sharing is bad, this is exactly the type of practical common sense thinking, that could ensure the mobile data is dead before it's life even begins. 

By shutting down the ability to share safety observations, hazards or quality issues in real time across the team, could lead to no-one actually participating in using the app when it's released. This could be the silent nail in the coffin. The end result of the user experience may become yet another head office limited experience that is lacking the raw essence that leverages the real time connectivity that smart phones provide.

Problems such as curating spam content on a network are largely solved problems. There are many ways to tackle these sorts of issues with technology today. It could be as simple as having moderation only on the first five posts by a user, and then allowing them to post instantly afterwards if they have demonstrated their posts are above board.

Another option could be to have a weighting or voting system on content so that the best content rises to the top. Image recognition can be used, where images of body parts can be reviewed to moderators, but images not containing body parts are posted. There are many ways this type of problem could be solved, but it has been solved in other tech plays, so it can be solved in construction.

Lessons from building iAuditor

Inside iAuditor, we have a public library, which now has 60,000 inspection templates in it. I had no idea if people would share an inspection template when we built it, and I had no idea how we would curate the content, as people could post anything. But it turns out that we have had zero issues with inappropriate content, and we have been asked to remove templates that breach copyright five times after millions of uses. The result has been a resounding success.

There are two things we have learnt from this. That if there is genuine benefit in workers using a system, they generally won’t abuse it.

iAuditor built it’s success on empowering the front line worker. Making their job easier, helping the people in the field to do their job faster and smarter than they had been able to before. That is why it works. Management often lose sight of what matters to the people they want to use their system, because they are overtaken by their own requirements.

Data collection is a separate problem to data reporting. They are linked, but they have differences that are subtle and yet critical to get right.

"We want control". This is another common theme I hear from companies, they want to lock down the experience so users cannot control what they do. Again, this completely disempowers the front line workers and makes them feel like the robot that the system implies they are.

We have seen SafetyCulture customers who now consider their front line workers their greatest source of R&D.

iAuditor allows the front line worker to create a workflow that suits their requirements. The fear of management is that everyone will just be doing whatever they want, and the data won’t make any sense.

This is a very real concern and some standardisation is required to ensure the required data is collected. But why put a hard stop on innovation from that point. By all means enforce policies for static data sets to be collected in the field, but in addition encourage front line teams to find additional use cases and identify opportunities to further improve workflows.

People have long said that “your people are your greatest asset”, and many companies take great care of their people as a result. But the people also are an incredible source of knowledge, which until now has largely been laying dormant for the most part.

Many traditional problems that come with change, such as engagement, buy in and intensive training programs magically dissolve when you put the front line workers in charge of change.

The challenge facing companies today, is to embed innovation into their DNA. We have seen industries such as pharmaceuticals and mining crows source their R&D, and technology is now making that possible in many other industries. The inability to make decisions quickly stifles innovation, so small teams need to be empowered by management to take calculated risks, drive change and discover improved ways to work.

I also published a post on building a $2k app for enterprise here.

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