Everybody’s making mobile apps these days, yet Alex Bratton says most businesses get them wrong — wasting time and money making bad ones and losing time and money with outdated processes.
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Bratton is CEO and chief geek — that’s an official company title — of Lisle-based Lextech, which makes — you guessed it — mobile apps for businesses. His book, “Billion Dollar Apps: How to Find and Implement a Winning Mobile Strategy,” is sprinkled with stories from customers. Innovation Networks, an initiative of Chicago-based venture collaborative TechNexus, published the book in December.
Bratton said the biggest mistakes most businesses make include not thinking clearly about what they want an app to accomplish, what benefits users will get from it and how it will help the bottom line. Without properly addressing these questions, he said, even well-designed apps are useless.
“If the adoption is low, it tells you (that) you totally missed the boat,” he said.
Bratton laid out a six-step process that he said companies should follow to create good apps and, just as importantly, to avoid creating bad apps.
Step 1: Establish your goal
“Like anything in business, you need to make sure everyone who is a part of this mobility effort understands what we are trying to achieve as an organization,” he said. “What is our strategic goal? Hopefully it has numbers attached to it. What is your measurable strategic goal?”
Step 2: Find the workflows that form the process
The company should determine “the processes and workflows in our organization that support” the goal, he said. “If I’m talking about growing revenue, then I’m probably talking about outside and inside sales processes. If I’m talking about efficiencies and cutting costs, I’m probably talking about my manufacturing; my service delivery; my operational side of the business. Step 2 is looking at those workflows, and mapping out what my steps are.”
Step 3: Identify workflow issues
“The most important step in the entire process is No. 3, which is identifying the problems and inefficiencies with those processes,” Bratton said. “Those are the gains that we can get from mobility.
Those problems, especially the meaty ones, soak up extra time, resources, people, money. Those problems are where we want to focus. Hopefully they can articulate that in a detailed manner, such as: ‘My sales people spend 15 percent of their time filling out paper they don’t need to,’ because then I can equate that to a sales cost, or a potential revenue lift if I can free up that 15 percent.”
Step 4: Generate app ideas
“Here’s where we can start talking about technology and getting really excited,” he said. “For the given problems, what are the potential mobile apps that could help solve that? … We don’t ever talk about apps until we know the problem we’re trying to address. Otherwise we end up with (an app on) the corporate directory. We end up with something that just doesn’t add any value to the company.”
Step 5: Calculate the impact of your concepts
“This is calculating the dollars and cents of new revenue potential, or potential cost savings because of efficiencies,” Bratton said.
He said this step sometimes rules out a proposed app. He said that happened with a manufacturing company for which his company did some work.
“Their focus was (to) grow revenue, and we ran through the whole process with them,” he said. “When we got to step 5 … the obvious app wasn’t worth anything. We were able to save them from the trap of building that app because of looking at the numbers.”
Step 6: Score and prioritize your concepts
“Make a list of … which apps to do first, he said.
“In step 4, we should have generated at least 50 ideas for apps. When we get to step 6, we’re prioritizing that by just rating things on different criteria, (such as) ‘How much retraining is this going to require?’ ‘Do our IT systems have the data necessary to support this?’ The output of that is your prioritized roadmap of dozens of apps, what order to build them in and why. And the ‘why’ means: What am I expecting each one to do for my company?”
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