The Power of Digital Optimization for Infield Employee Productivity

Increasing infield employee productivity using mobile technology is a compelling value proposition. The benefits are apparent, and for years now, we’ve seen the stats showing increased data collection and quality, reductions in time to complete audits and inspections, reductions in travel time back and forth to the office, and time savings from not needing to re-enter data. We also see how being better informed with immediate access to historical records leads to better decision-making.

However, many organizations still have not taken what seems to be this obvious step. Other factors may have intervened to derail what, on the surface, appears to be a clear opportunity to improve administrative efficiency. This blog offers digital optimization advice gained from working through and solving the problems that local governments often encounter. You will learn:

• What problems to expect.
• How they can be navigated far easier today than ever before.
• The traditional impediments to accessing skilled mobile development resources.
• How to overcome everyday struggles with app deployment and app store rules.
• How to manage the complexities of offline or disconnected operations.
• How to achieve connectivity systems of record.

If you’re ready to leverage the latest tech to improve your resident engagement strategy, then keep reading.

Three Guiding Principles to Digitally Optimizing Legacy Systems

We’ll start with the three guiding principles that must serve as the foundational elements for any administration embarking on a digital transformation of their resident engagement.

1. Start Small – Don’t Try to Boil the Ocean. There’s a great temptation to embark on the big-picture solution right away. Be careful to split that journey into small stages that give you confidence in your technology choices and the ability to deliver. The best path to project success is to aim for early wins. Start with relatively contained and manageable projects that still demonstrate the real value at each stage, ideally across a range of users. Your first objective should be rapidly delivering a minimally viable product (MVP). This development step is critical to proving the chosen technology stack, building internal support, and establishing a base camp position from which to launch new digital expeditions, whether they be subsequent enhancements or entirely new projects.
2. Work with What You’ve Got – “The reality for most is you cannot ‘greenfieldy’ our digital business technology. So, you have to start building it with what you have now.” – Andy Kyte, VP/Gartner Fellow (Gartner AADI Summit, Sydney) Unless you’re going through an imminent replacement of your core business systems, you need to start building on what you already have. Your need to improve efficiencies now means you cannot wait for future systems before beginning your digital optimization journey. It’s vitally important that you start working to extend your existing systems, even if it’s only to make modest gains. You must build experiences and begin the process of refocusing your organization on a digital future.
3. Seek Optimization Over Transformation – “…determine if transformation, as envisioned by your organization’s leadership, is possible at the current level of enterprise and IT maturity. If it is not, make sustainable digital optimization of operations the primary focus of your information and technology strategic and operational plans.” – “Government CIOs Must Resist Transformation Hype and Focus on Digital Optimization,” Gartner. Attempting a big bang transformation project is not always the best course of action. Sometimes, the core systems won’t support such an aggressive initiative, and other times, there are rules or processes (even legislation) that will work against you. Based on considerable evidence, Gartner consistently advises that “Transformation gets the hype, but optimization gets the results.” There’s nothing to be lost by first looking at how digital technologies can reduce friction between existing processes to start you on a path of continual improvement.

The Seven Essential Elements of Successful Optimization Projects

1. Develop Apps Quickly, Gain Confidence Rapidly

It’s vital to gain the confidence of your users and prove your business case as early as possible. Seek smart app-building tools and seamlessly managed infrastructure services that will allow you to minimize the development time of your apps. If you have users who are keen to participate in the development process, then selecting tools that can support non-developers will be a vital element of your ability to deliver projects rapidly.

Test the claims and capabilities of various tools and services. Your first projects should aim to confirm the ability of your team to deliver and deploy a solution with the chosen tools and services. Even an unsuitable initial tool selection will provide valuable lessons. By using an agile, MVP-based approach from the beginning, you’ll minimize the effects of a misaligned choice.

Be Wary of Trading Speed for Functionality – Don’t Get Locked In

Minimizing the app backlog remains a pressing issue for most medium to large organizations. Unfortunately, tools that claim to offer a quick and easy fix often come with technical lock-in and limited flexibility as you move to subsequent stages of development.

Facilitating easy access to your data, plus integrations with and workflows between your existing systems, will become increasingly important. Your long-term needs will best be served by using tools and services that are open and based on industry standards and equally serve the needs of both hardcore developers and do-it-yourself citizen developers.

Non-technical or resident developers are your key to rapid progress unless they engage in shadow IT practices where you lose visibility or the ability to control and manage the process. Note that most tools and services target either developers or non-developers, rarely both. Selecting a code-optional toolset drives collaboration between IT teams and the business and is critical to acceleration and de-risk app development efforts. Code-optional tools and services provide more flexibility than no-code tools. They stop the long development cycles and duplication of effort that come when IT teams need to scrap early no-code work and start again in a more expansive toolset.

Code-optional also de-risks development for IT teams because they are only being called upon to enhance or extend those Version 1.0 projects that the business has already primed and for which it has already gained user support and usage analytics.

2. Create Apps Your Residents and Staff Will Love to Use

Your most successful apps will be ones that delight your users because they provide a great user experience and genuinely make their jobs easier. Simply moving existing forms and processes straight onto phones and tablets may seem like an obvious first step, and that’s what many organizations do without enough planning.

This rush can backfire, sometimes burdening users with a new process that’s more cumbersome than the previous pen-and-paper process. Keyboard entry of many fields can be frustrating and time-consuming, especially for less tech-savvy users.

Wherever possible, try to utilize technologies that minimize the need to manually input data, thus speeding up any interaction with the app, while also promoting consistency and accuracy.

Where users need to enter data, it should be simple to do with an intuitive interface that utilizes familiar workflows, widgets, and icons with which they are already comfortable. The approaches that you can look to leverage include:

• Prepopulating form fields with as much contextual information as possible, such as date, time, location, and user details. Such data can generally be sourced from the device itself or a user’s ID/profile.
• Importing data from a customer relationship management (CRM), work order and asset tracking, or compliance system and prepopulating attributes and information.
• Making it easy to input data using other entry methods such as voice, barcodes, or OCR text recognition.
• Enabling annotations of photos and illustrations.
• Integrating with Internet of Things (IoT) technology and proximity systems to take the user straight to contextually relevant forms, work guides, or workflows.
• Giving users simple tools to centrally manage select-box choices and picklists for any app to consume instead of hard-coding such as constantly changing variables.
• Embed work manuals or contextually useful activity guides and illustrations or diagrams into the app to give the user as much help and prompting as possible.

Prototype with Your Users

You will want to test users to obtain ample amounts of feedback and to work with them during the user interface prototyping phase. Be open to ongoing improvement and remember that you are building a solution that must meet your users’ needs. Your users will appreciate sound design principles. Simplicity and brevity in layout, assistance where needed, shortcuts, quality performance, and clear hierarchies in navigation are more impactful than visual attractiveness.

3. Recognize that Offline is Normal

“If we want users to like our software, we should design it to behave like a likable person-respectful, generous, and helpful.” – Alan Cooper, Software Designer, Programmer, and the Father of the Visual Basic Programming Language

Despite living in an always-connected world, poor or no connectivity still has an all-too-regular impact on infield employees, which seemingly limits the relevance of mobile solutions. There remain many network blackspots, even in populated metro and regional areas, not just remote geographies and connectivity is sometimes also lost in deep buildings, elevator shafts, parks, parking lots, and cold storage rooms, not to mention signal conflicting workplaces.

Beyond these physical issues, network congestion, network loss, and even problems with individual cell towers will impact the connectivity that your online app expects. To the uninitiated, connectivity is a significant barrier, but it doesn’t need to be. Putting offline operations on your vital elements list is a critical first step in any employee productivity app.

Not All Offline Options are Created Equal

Your next thought should be, “What level of offline operation will adequately support my users?” Your options include:

• Interrupted Operation – If there’s a short service gap, your app won’t hang or crash while in operation. It will still allow users to edit existing work, but it won’t restart or complete an operation without a connection. Your users will be familiar with this type of action from experience using many web-based applications.
• Disconnected Operation—The app only needs a connection at start-up and fully anticipates disconnection. This need requires explicit strategies like optimized caching and submission queuing, incorporating both client-side and server-side code, and is typically more challenging to do well.
• Offline First—The app locally stores all its required assets and performs syncs with your host systems when the network is available, but it can be shut down and successfully restarted when offline.

With enough planning and an experienced team, all the above scenarios are readily achievable if you set out with an explicit requirement in mind and let that guide your decision-making. Modem contemporary tools will take some of the complexity out of offline operation, but more in-depth offline needs always require some specific planning and custom implementation.

Are You Existing Systems Ready for Mobile? Ask yourself: “Can our corporate systems of record handle the offline workflows we seek?”

In some cases, it’s mandatory to be connected to the core system to complete certain transactions, like creating a new account, and if so, how will your offline strategy address such factors?

4. Make App Deployment Easy

While various tools and services from different vendors have sought to make the app build process easy, deploying apps to a user community is often overlooked. Deployment is particularly challenging when you must cover Android, iOS, and web delivery, which organizations typically require. Your options for multi-OS delivery have solidified over the last few years, and in many scenarios, there’s little benefit in going through the hassle of delivering your apps as native ones through app stores. The administrative efforts of running your enterprise accounts and certificates can be considerable, so think hard before you make such a commitment.

Recently, there has been an enthusiastic move to utilize progressive web apps (PWA). These web applications load like regular web pages or websites but can offer enhanced functionality on mobile devices not previously available via a browser.

Features such as working offline, saving drafts, pending queues, push notifications, home screen icons, browser bar elimination, and device hardware access, have traditionally only been available to native applications. PWAs are building in popularity for agencies and enterprises as they combine the speed and flexibility of the web with the user experience and power of a native application.

Hybrid or Native

If the advanced capabilities of a PWA still don’t fully support your use case, then Apple, Google and Microsoft will require you to lodge a native (or at the very least a Hybrid) app in their app stores. Hybrid is the more practical approach in many instances since using HTML5 and JavaScript (or more likely one of the several higher-level frameworks) makes for reduced development time and a single code base.

Full native app development is a bold and costly decision for mobilizing business systems since it requires maintenance of at least two, three, or possibly four separate code bases since web delivery remains a reality for most organizations too. If you choose this path, it’s unlikely you’ll be looking at integrated development frameworks.

Alongside your choice of app delivery, the other crucial decision you’ll need to make is how you’ll manage updates to your apps. If you want your apps to be updated automatically as soon as you’ve made changes, then consider an evergreen approach where users don’t have to remember or respond to a prompt and explicitly download the updates themselves. Other alternatives are mobile device management or mobile application management (MOM/MAM) software that both secures the devices and gives you centralized management control of the apps on a device.

5. APIs – Keys to Integration and Orchestration

Unless you’re developing a completely self-contained application in which all functionality is within the app and downloaded to the device, your app will be talking to other data sources or business systems. Most employee productivity apps fall into this category.

Creating a layer of easily callable services is the most effective way to set yourself up for ongoing app success. These should allow your apps to interact with your business systems and back-end data, using well-constructed and maintained interfaces that are designed to be easily called from any number of apps. The setup and maintenance of what’s called an outward-facing API layer, and how you can make it quickly and reliably accessible to your app users should be a significant aspect of your decision-making.

Are Your Systems Ready?

You’ll also need to consider the suitability of your existing corporate applications to work more interactively with more significant numbers of in-field users. Not that long ago, this was one of the biggest-if not the most significant-stumbling blocks in mobile app projects. Many legacy systems didn’t, or still don’t, come with open APis, or their vendors tried to keep content access restricted by providing limited APIs at unreasonably high prices.

Another challenge is that many legacy systems, even if an API was available, were never designed for the constant always-on interactions with a myriad of mobile users, each capable of lodging far richer content (e.g., photos, videos, voice notes) than most audit and compliance systems ever anticipated.

Care About the User Experience

Such scenarios often require you to handle data transformation, resizing rich content files and a behind-the-scenes store-and-forward feature to maintain a positive user experience. In many cases, you’ll also need to manage the moving of data into multiple systems from a single inspection or form submission. This process is known as orchestration. When required, orchestration design will be vital to the success of your projects.

The good news is that there are services available now that simplify the integration between systems. Microsoft Flow and Zapier are leading examples of simple, point-and-click integrations that are surprisingly powerful yet usable by non-technical staff. For more complex scenarios, there are more substantial integration tools such as Dell Boomi, Mulesoft, Jitterbit, and others that are intended for use by programmers.

6. Operations – The Hidden Resource Trap

Orchestration efforts will likely be needed for any mobile form or app that integrates with your systems of record. There will be various levels of infrastructure required for such coordinating, such as intermediate data stores, hosting and management of APis, and storage and interrogation of log files. You’ll also need to manage multiple environments for development, testing and production for both your apps and your integration elements. And of course, you’ll need to make sure your production environment is secure and resourced for optimum performance.

DevOps to NoOps

With most services now being cloud-based, you will need someone with the niche skillset required to build and operate your cloud infrastructure. And while some programmers are now becoming cloud-operations aware, it’s uncommon to find citizens with significant skill capabilities in the development and operations (DevOps) space.

You will either need a team of operations staff (one person is rarely enough if your operation is in any way mission-critical) or you will need to consider a NoOps environment-one in which your project elements are automatically rolled out into tried and tested infrastructure and ideally supported by management, monitoring systems, and personnel. This approach will allow your developers (including community developers) to focus on solution development without worrying about how to run the infrastructure.

Look for strong credentials in cloud operations from your provider, including a solid understanding of the issues and challenges municipalities face. Finally, don’t be afraid to ask for a wide-ranging service level agreement (SLA).

Keep Control of Your Projects

As your optimization projects start gaining traction, you’ll hopefully be creating numerous apps and APis. If you’ve encouraged different groups of community developers, then you’ll want to maintain a level of control without limiting their creativity and enthusiasm.

Make sure you choose a product set that gives you a consolidated view of both the app projects and the APis and web services you’re providing. This level of visibility not only allows you to maintain security, auditability, and performance, but it will also enable you to provide technical help when required.

7. Analyze for Success

As you plan each digital optimization initiative, consider how you’re going to measure the success of each new project. What metrics or activities are you expecting to improve, and by how much? How much are citizens and staff using your app? Who isn’t using it? What seems to be working well for users and what isn’t? What is the user experience like? Are there long load times and are administrative systems coping?

To answer these questions, you’ll need to collect, measure, and analyze the metadata of app usage and API performance-the data that will inform your who, when, where, how often and how long questions. Also, consider that the indicators of success aren’t just about the performance and uptake of an app. Your business metrics, such as, “how many more inspections do we do each day?” will require you also capture business-level data from within the application to compare against usage data. This requirement means custom analytics data capture alongside the standard metadata capture.

Actionable = Valuable

Everyone’s measures of success differ, so you’ll need a flexible way to access and visualize the data you’re capturing. Off-the-shelf analytics can give some of the answers, but make sure you can connect analytics data into a business intelligence (BI) platform to create customized reporting.

Your municipal leaders will appreciate key performance indicator (KPI) dashboards that give them high-level visibility into their performance against objectives. Soon, there will be significant administrative efficiency possibilities to be gained through machine learning and artificial intelligence technology advancements.

Final Advice

We hope we’ve demonstrated that what may once have been major project blockers no longer need to be serious impediments to your digital initiatives.

The power and flexibility of code-optional app builders, the rise of services like Microsoft Flow and Zapier, and the evolution of progressive web apps have changed the game. These technologies have made it easier than ever to bring your legacy audit/ compliance systems into the mobile era.

What follows is a summary of critical steps to help you get started and push this long-standing need back to the top of your to-do list:

• Look for a sophisticated app builder tool that non-developers can utilize.
• Look beyond forms to the easy creation and linking of work guides, instruction manuals, and compliance certificates.
• Consider not just the build phase, but the easy deployment and management of your apps.
• Thoroughly test each vendor’s approach to offline or disconnected operation, and their mobile-first credentials when leveraging device capabilities such as photos, signatures, GPS, and scanners.
• Avoid lock-in, assess how open a system is, and if easy and low-cost integration with other systems of record is a central premise.
• Place equal scrtiny on the secure operation and performance of the systems and infrastructure that underpin your apps and their linkages to other systems.