How PLM vendors can find mobile moments

People are getting crazy about mobile apps these days. We are spending more time on our mobile devices. Nobody will argue about importance of mobile. We can see different mobile strategies among PLM vendors. At the same time, for most of them “mobile” is about developing “same version” of PLM suite, but for mobile device. Back in 2012 I posted about that – PLM gold rush: did vendors miss the point? Few months ago I was talking about “social” as a new mobile opportunity for PLM. I think PLM vendors didn’t crack “mobile” topic yet.

Forrester research put an interesting perspective on how to develop mobile apps. They called it “mobile mind shift”. Navigate here to learn more. The following Forrester video gives you an idea about what is behind mobile shift. The most interesting part I found is related to finding so called “mobile moment”. Navigate here to see an interesting table summarizing a potential list of mobile moments. I found some of them speaking very closely to potential mobile moments for PLM customers.

To succeed in your customer’s mobile moments, you must understand their journey and identify their needs and context at each potential moment. Then design your mobile application to quickly provide just what’s needed in that moment.

Here are few examples of consumer sale, business meeting or field maintenance.

Get information on a product while in a Best Buy store. Use a tablet to show a doctor a new Medtronic device. Retrieve maintenance history for a GE wind turbine.

These examples make sense to me. However, it made me think about complexity of finding these mobile moments. The situations where a specific customer wants to be involved into mobile context specific iteration can be very different. While lots of companies are moving to mobile these days, it looks like it will take time until overall B2B eco-system will be ready to mobile product and business related contextual scenarios.

What is my conclusion? B2C ecosystem is changing fast. Consumers are moving to mobile and requesting more and more interaction with businesses via mobile devices. However, B2B applications are not there yet. It seems to me sales and field maintenance operations  can be two potential domains where PLM vendors can find mobile moments in the near future. We will see more mobile interactions coming soon with enterprise applications that will provide PLM “mobile moments”. This is an early alert for PLM vendors and PLM architects.  Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg