Managing The Mobile Workforce

The workforce of today is evolving rapidly. Whether in manufacturing or management consulting, electrical engineering or fashion, workforces are becoming more agile and mobile to keep up with the evolutionary pace of business.

What Are The Implications Of Growing Mobile Technology On The Financial Industry?

Smartphones have revolutionised the world in ways which were unthinkable till just about a decade ago. With over one billion users worldwide and more than 2.5 million apps, smartphones have become an integral part of our day-to-day lives. It is no longer a device for merely keeping in touch with people; with increasing capabilities, users have begun exploring their mobile devices for banking, work related purposes, local searches, as a travel aid and more. A study by Facebook indicates that more than 100 million of Facebook’s 500 million users are using mobile phones to manage their account. Essentially, mobile devices have now become highly personalised minicomputers that occupy lesser space than a paperback and has dramatically changed how we interact with each other.

What’s Most Misunderstood about Quality Assurance in Custom Software?

When most people think of Quality Assurance—or QA to the initiated—they think of a room full of obnoxious overgrown teenagers pounding on their keyboards trying to make software malfunction. Anyone with IT experience in web application development knows there’s more to it than that, but many custom software projects run into problems because the relationship between the development team and the QA team is allowed to become too antagonistic. The developers work to make the users’ lives easier, then the QA people try to find flaws in their work. While many software vendors take a reductive approach to QA, treating it as nothing more than a search for bugs, the best approach to custom projects is to integrate QA processes into the development process from the beginning. In other words, as soon as you’re done answering the question “How should it work?” you should be going on to answer “How will we know it’s working that way?”

3 Technology Trends Driving Modern Workstyles

The fast pace of technological change is defining the digital workplace.

People work differently.

The things that motivate you and drive your productivity may do nothing for your colleagues. And especially given the influx of teleworkers and the rise of geographically dispersed teams, your colleague could just as likely be sitting across the globe as across the office, creating even more workstyle diversity.

And that’s okay.

The technology that drives our workday forward has grown, evolved and adapted to facilitate different workstyles, processes and preferences. It continually evolves, and the only way to truly find success in modern business is to evolve right alongside it.

Technology is truly at the heart of our modern workstyles. Here are just three of the technology trends that are defining today’s business:

Anything-as-a-Service                                

The rise of the “as a Service” model has put practically any business function you can think of within reach of any team, regardless of size, infrastructure or technical know-how like S3 Corp. in Viet nam software services. Many of these applications, platforms and more can be purchased and activated within seconds, instantly filling gaps in your organization’s technology needs. In other words, the barrier for entry has become incredibly low, allowing companies of any size to quickly try and buy new tools to help their businesses grow.

And best of all, the time and effort that IT has traditionally spent maintaining systems, upgrading security and adding new features and functionality is now shouldered by the vendors. IT no longer has to be responsible for ensuring that your organization has the most up-to-date version, the latest features and recent security patches—it’s all updated vendor-side. As IT departments are continually tasked with doing more with less, offloading these sorts of responsibilities will be key to keeping pace with the demands of the business.

Regardless of your need there’s more than likely an “as a Service” version that will meet the requirements of your team, department or organization.

More Intelligent Apps

Mobile application development are nothing new and have been driving an increasingly on-the-go workforce for years now. Every department across an organization is more mobile, and we all rely on our mobile devices for the information, people and files we need to get work done.

Apps are getting smarter, though. Through contextual intelligence, integration with wearables and improved features and functionality such as better GPS, geofencing and more, our mobile applications are more sophisticated than ever. And developers are just beginning to tap the potential of this increasingly intelligent set of devices and applications.

For example, a commonplace feature like the push notification—which brings information and potential actions directly to a user’s attention—is becoming more actionable and integrated into our day-to-day lives. Notifications can serve not only as reminders, but also as jumping-off points for meetings, files, discussions and other common workday activities. And thanks to integration with smartwatches, notifications will continue to become more powerful and readily available.

Improving mobile intelligence is all about removing steps from traditional processes, making mobile work as seamless and frictionless as possible.

Changing Communication and Collaboration

In today’s increasingly globalized workplace, with colleagues scattered across time zones, companies need a wide variety of communication and collaboration mediums in order to create a productive work environment.

Email is the old standby, but it is quickly showing its age. While it’s certainly still useful for updates, when it comes to true collaboration, email’s lack of version control and its long string of disconnected threads demonstrate its shortcomings.

More recently, unified communications solutions have started coming into their own, and with good reason; providing access to a multitude of communication methods empowers workers to collaborate in the most efficient manner as their needs dictate. An IM might be sufficient for a quick check-in, but it can be escalated to a meeting more or less instantly.

There’s also been a rise in near-time or asynchronous collaboration tools, such as virtual team workspaces. These solutions give workers a cloud-based, central location to work together that doesn’t require real-time interaction, a boon for more geographically dispersed groups. All of the document and file versioning is synced to the cloud (and we’re back to SaaS), ensuring everyone on the team always has access to the correct version.

Regardless of the chosen method, the constantly shifting communication and collaboration landscape is a sign that our modern workstyles demand a variety of collaboration mediums.

The speed at which technology evolves can be intimidating. But the practical benefit is that our tech is constantly adapting to the needs of the marketplace. Regardless of your unique workstyle and needs, there are hardware, software, applications and services out there designed to help you—and your organization—always work at the highest level of productivity and teamwork.

S3 Tech Blog

Native or Web App? Integrating Software Applications Across Platforms

 

Once you’ve decided to develop a custom application for your business, you’ll have to determine whether it would be best for you to invest in a native app or a web app.  As the word native suggests, such an app would run (natively) on a particular operating system, with its functionality coded specifically for that platform. A web app, however, would exist in the cloud, so to speak, and would run online as a web-based application.

How IT Departments Can Make BYOD Safer: Five Top Tips

Bring your own device (BYOD) is nothing new – employees have been using their personal IT in the workplace, or at home for work purposes, since the last millennium.

Nor is it something most IT departments can prevent – even if personal devices are barred from the corporate network, there’s not much IT can do about the use of personal devices, personal mobile apps or software, and personal cloud services, while employees are working.

8 Ways MDM Can Ease IT Pain

Over the past few weeks, I’ve talked with various organizations about the possibility of implementing mobile device management (MDM). To my surprise, many IT managers and CIOs didn’t easily grasp the concept of MDM and what it can do for their organizations. I’m not sure if it’s the name “mobile device” in MDM — or that first iterations of MDM were slim on features — but there seems to be a disconnect about what MDM can do and how it’s perceived by IT professionals.

How is your app doing? Here are some key questions to think about

 

Doing what we do at Konotor, we have friends in the app world — many of whom are product and marketing folks in the companies we engage with. We often discuss metrics they are tracking (or could be tracking) for their apps.

The Technologies That Will Change The Way You Shop

The way you shop is changing. These startups are playing their part.

 

People love to shop. For a long time, the only way to shop was to go out and pay for your purchase in-person at a store or market.

Making App Design Beautiful And Useful

Everyone in finance faces dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them every working day, but usually without a second thought, unless they are really awful.

They are the user interfaces on desktops, tablets and phones. Designing them well requires people who can combine a knowledge of data, computers and design.