When it comes to restaurants, I like to be a bit of a grazer. There’s nothing better than going with friends to a lovely new restaurant and ordering lots of small portions and sharing them around. It really allows people to savor the different flavors and options on offer.
Enterprise software is, as I see it, analogous to restaurant dining. You can go in and order the huge steak that will leave you feeling bloated -- that is much like the traditional, monolithic enterprise software offerings. Or you can graze and enjoy the variety the restaurant has to offer, and that is the new way of thinking about enterprise apps. Some companies talk about mobile moments, some about contextual apps -- but whatever name you use, it’s all about doing specific, bite-sized operations.
This is the world that Capriza works in. The company calls itself an enterprise mobility vendor focusing on business applications, but it really is a platform to allow bite-sized tasks to be completed by end users of enterprise software.
I’ve raved about Capriza in the past, in part because I’ve had the misfortune to try and work with big, monolithic enterprise systems and have seen just how painful they are. The Capriza approach (and, to be fair, the approach taken by other similar vendors) feels much more like the way consumers approach their own IT -- small apps doing a specific task at a specific time.
So I was interested to hear from Capriza that their latest release, Jaguar (sleek and fast, get it?) includes a range of new pre-built micro apps that are designed to more rapidly enable the move from monolithic to bite-sized for field service and employee self-service tasks.
New universal micro apps for field services
This latest release from Capriza builds on their prior introduction of the “universal micro apps” notion. These apps were created to help show how organizations could rapidly mobile-enable what they do -- a good idea to reduce time-to-value and, most importantly for the company, increase the chances of prospects converting into customers.
Field services professionals like delivery personnel, inspectors, technicians and maintenance crews traditionally struggle with paper-based processes and lack easy access to corporate data, such as customer, work order and inventory information. These new field services micro apps provide these employees at the edge with both data and, most importantly, specific workflows related to their jobs.
Specifically, the release makes it easy for personnel to access real-time inventory information, view customer details and submit reports while in the field.
New universal micro apps for ESS
Employee self service (ESS) is an increasingly important area for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it makes the HR process far more efficient but, perhaps more importantly given the mass influx of millennials entering the workforce with their particular digital expectations, it engages these digital natives in a workflow and process that is more aligned with the way they work in their personal lives. Traditional corporate HR portals are based on enterprise applications that were not generally built for mobility and are thus difficult, unfriendly and inflexible.
The new ESS micro apps offer mobile access to quickly and easily perform common tasks such as requesting PTO, viewing pay stubs and searching a corporate directory.
WorkSimple App
Capriza is trying to deftly introduce a more efficient way of containing mobile applications on top of advice that has both business and personal apps on it. WorkSimple is a kind of an application encapsulation concept whereby the different micro apps that a user needs are personalized to that particular user. Push notifications for new tasks and pending updates are then sent, within one context, to the user.
Obviously inspired by Apple’s Widgets and Google Now, but contextualized for a workplace setting, WorkSimple also includes a home page where business metrics from each micro app are consolidated and displayed as personalized live cards for easy access. By doing this, Capriza helps to avoid the criticism that these micro apps can create, namely creating a more complex user experience and workplace.
“Taking complex enterprise business applications and simply delivering them on a smaller screen is a recipe for failure,” said Simon Berman, vice president of product marketing for Capriza. “Today’s leading organizations have realized that a successful mobile strategy is centered around how best to enable users to complete everyday tasks. That has been our approach and what’s driving our customers’ success.”
MyPOV
I’ve always been bullish on Capriza. To be honest I see them as an obvious acquisition target for one of the large enterprise IT vendors looking to create a nice mobile moment workplace. Time will tell whether that comes to pass.