Your boss calls you into her office for your annual performance review. In the course of discussing your impact on the enterprise, she asks a series of simple questions:
What two apps do you use that have most increased your productivity, effectiveness, and impact over the past year?
What two apps have most improved and enhanced the productivity and effectiveness of your direct reports? How do you know?
How does your team share "BAP" — Best App Practice — internally and throughout the enterprise?
What kind of apps would most dramatically improve your personal effectiveness as a leader and manager over the coming year?
What apps could really "move the needle" to make your team's performance more outstanding?
These questions are neither unreasonable nor unfair. How impressive would your answers be?
Suppose your three biggest clients had comparable concerns. They'd be looking for insight into how well you manage yourself, your people, and their business. They want to know how energetically you're adopting competitive and value-added tools on their behalf. Effective "app-lication" seems a reasonable proxy for helping assess how seriously knowledge workers develop themselves, their people and their opportunities.
Bluntly, your best clients and most ambitious bosses would be unimpressed if iPhones, Androids, Blackberries, and tablets weren't being creatively deployed to supercharge the personal and interpersonal productivity of your people. If your client's procurement arm wanted to know which five apps your team used to drive new value for their account, you'd best have a compelling answer.
Just as important, if your client asks you to suggest which high-impact apps they should explore to better manage their business, would your team's recommendations get their teams excited? Good clients constantly look for good advice. That's increasingly going to mean your clients want good "app-vice," as well.
This theme popped to top of mind while working with a large professional services company that sees mobile technologies as their force multiplier. Within the last 18 months, this global firm — just like the U.S. Army — set up an internal "app store" where professionals and support staff alike could download both bespoke and selected business-related apps. No Angry Birds here.
What's interesting is not so much the apps themselves but how the store has quickly evolved into an "app-ommendation engine," a virtual vehicle where shoppers can see the firm's most popular apps by geography, practice, and job title. It's not quite Amazon's sophisticated engine, but intrapreneurs and users can blog, Jive, and post comments on how well — or poorly — the apps work. "App management" is clearly becoming a form of knowledge management for the enterprise.
While I don't believe clients have yet been given access to the firm's app store, it's simply a matter of time before the most successful apps are smuggled or exported to clients. Of course, these firms may have their own app stores and boutiques, too. One of the most intriguing arenas of digital innovation and organizational exchange will be how freely and openly such companies will trade apps to promote inter-enterprise efficiencies, understandings, and relationships.
I can't help but think that Oprah Winfrey, who recently ended her landmark TV show after a remarkable 25-year run and who reportedly loves her iPad, missed a fantastic pop cultural opportunity. The woman who gave iPads to her O magazine staff — and publicly purred how its Scrabble app changed her life — transformed the publishing industry when she launched Oprah's Book Club in 1996. Publishers credit the "Oprah Effect" for selling tens of millions of books. So where was Oprah's App Club? I bet it would have had a bigger impact than OWN.
Does your company, client community or innovation ecosystem have an App Club? Should it? How important could it be?
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