The MobileFirst keynote at IBM Impact 2014 was led by Ed Brill Director Marketing IBM MobileFirst and Phil Buckellew Vice President Enterprise Mobile IBM Software Group.

Ed kicked off the keynote with some very interesting facts on how far we’ve come in the mobile space in the past year. The average mobile phone user checks his or her phone 150 times per day. When developing a mobile app for your company consider that 80% of apps are used once and then deleted. Truly mobile is changing how engagements and work get done.

In today’s mobile computing era we’ve moved from pull to push from millions of PCs to billions of mobile devices from static apps to dynamic services and from reactive security to intelligent proactive protection. Companies have to stay up-to-date to deliver a better customer experience or risk being left behind. Ed noted in his talk that 73% of companies that have set up a mobile strategy have realized ROI on their investments but less than half of companies actually have a mobile strategy.

Case Studies: Bank of Montreal and Nationwide

Two companies presented compelling success stories using IBM MobileFirst technologies to develop mobile apps.

Peter Poon Senior Manager Canadian Mobile Banking at the Bank of Montreal (BMO) gave a very interesting case study on how they used MobileFirst to realize success with their new mobile app. BMO’s first mobile banking app was released in mid-2011 for the iPhone Android and BlackBerry. It was a packaged app that offered different tiers of service but really couldn’t be tailored to what a specific user wanted.

Their challenge as is the challenge with most companies developing mobile applications is that customer expectations grow much faster than it takes to build a new mobile app. BMO couldn’t keep up with customer expectations and didn’t have enough in-house mobile expertise.

BMO’s solution was to build a mobile application using IBM Worklight. They chose Worklight for 3 reasons: flexibility productivity and reliability. Worklight enabled them to deploy unique features without expensive and time-consuming customization to include more functions more quickly and use HTML5 and open web standards.

In 9 months they were able to launch their new flexible app with features that allowed them to close gaps with their competitors. They introduced multi-card support person-to-person payments and post-dated bill payments. They also introduced appointment booking with bank employees; for example if an app user is house shopping he or she can book a meeting with a BMO home mortgage official through the app.  BMO’s new app also allowed users to post travel notifications rather than calling customer service. Users could also access their personal statement and account details through the app.

Within the first month of launch BMO saw impressive gains including:

• Improved scores in the Apple Android and BlackBerry app stores
• Winning Best New App and Featured App in the Finance Section of the Apple AppStore
• Winning Top Free App and Top Banking App honors in BlackBerry World
• Over 2000 branch appointments booked. This equates to over 2000 conversations and touchpoints with customers that would not have happened without the app.
• Over 5000 travel notifications sent. These are calls that otherwise would have clogged the call center.

Matt Heinrich Director of Applications from Nationwide Insurance was also on hand to discuss his company’s success with IBM MobileFirst. While Nationwide is most known for insurance their IT team has 19 different solution areas to support. Their mobile strategy has several facets:

• Ensure all web sites render well in standard PC browsers in addition to mobile platforms such as phones and tablets
• Provide targeted hybrid mobile apps that provide access to mobile device capabilities while utilizing similar skill sets to mobile web
• Create native mobile apps only when user experience or performance requirements demand it
• All implementations will adhere to Secure By Design practices

Using IBM MobileFirst for its first mobile app development Nationwide calculated that approximately 30% of time and money spent on app development was spent actually building the app. 70% was spent  on operational decisions and activities which is essentially a one-time cost. That means that each additional app launched on IBM MobileFirst will only require 30% of the time the first app required.

IBM MobileFirst and Lilly

To introduce how IBM MobileFirst can be leveraged in several aspects of mobile users’ lives Phil Buckellew introduced Lilly – a fictional rep from a biopharmaceutical company in Texas. To show how IBM MobileFirst can be leveraged for eCommerce Phil walked the audience walked through a story with Lilly who happens to have an app for her favorite coffee shop on her phone. Phil introduced the audience to IBM Xtify functionality that allows marketers to build campaigns to reach their audience. For example marketers can track Lilly’s activity and purchases at her favorite coffee shop through the app. They can push notifications to her phone to get her to visit a new store send her coupons or other campaigns to increase Lilly’s engagement.      

Phil also discussed how IBM can help banks produce a world-class mobile app with 4 innovative features:

• Next Best Offer: This is functionality that pushes offers to mobile app users based off of their activity. Banks can crawl users’ historical transactions that allow banks to push offers to people to get more revenue. For example if a user’s history shows them buying a plane ticket the bank can push and offer for travel insurance in the mobile app.
• Voice Authentication: This functionality allows users to record a verbal password. It authenticates the user’s voice and allows the user access to transactions via their mobile device.
• Speed Cash:  What happens if you need to get cash out of the ATM but you’ve forgotten your ATM card? Speed Cash functionality lets you enter an amount to withdraw from your mobile device from a specified ATM. The ATM has sensors that recognizes when the app (and your mobile device) is in its proximity and lets the app user withdraw the designated amount of money.
• Natural Language Assistant: Meet IBM’s version of Siri. The Natural Language Assistant’s name is Nina and she responds to verbal commands to access reports about your financial history. Ask Nina “How much money did I spend on my credit card this year?” The app will show a report of your credit card transactions for the year and Nina will verbally tell you the dollar amount spent on your credit card during that time.

In doctors’ offices IBM MobileFirst can leverage Watson’s cognitive abilities to diagnose and treat patients. In the example given Lilly visits a doctor’s office. Her medical history is available digitally and Watson reads her records and makes suggestions for tests to run with evidence for why he suggests each test. After the tests are run Lilly’s results are imported into the same app which generates treatments and clinical trials. Again the app provides clinical evidence for each treatment. The doctors can add their own notes recording them verbally. The app pulls in the audio incorporates the notes and changes the tests and based on the doctor’s notes.

IBM MobileFirst can help Lilly work at home as well using Maas 360. Lilly uses her own personal iPad with Maas 360 to preserve the IT policies pertaining to work. Maas 360 provides push notifications when documents are updated by Lilly’s co-workers so she can see when she has work to respond to. Lilly can access Maas 360 – which is password protected where the rest of the iPad is not – to access email documents full document editors that preserve formatting calendaring functionality and more.  Maas 360 even enforces policies on non-work apps. For example users cannot copy text from the secure Maas 360 environment into their personal email; if they do they will see an error message indicating that corporate policies don’t allow content on her clipboard to be pasted in a location outside of Maas 360.

IBM MobileFirst Offerings

To close the session Phil reviewed the many offerings IBM MobileFirst has to address a diverse set of needs:

• Advance app development and lifecycle management (IBM Worklight Platform)
• Scalable Services to accelerate and enrich mobile apps (IBM Bluemix Mobile Cloud Services)
• Database as a Service for next gen mobile and web apps (Cloudant an IBM Company)
• Deliver an integrated approach to mobile app and document management (Fiberlink Maas360)
• Protect mobile users and apps against fraudulent and unauthorized access (IBM Security access manager for Mobile v8.0)
• Risk aware Mobile app and risk-based mobile transaction assessment (BIM Trusteer)
• Visibility into the customer mobile experience  to optimize app design (IBM Tealeaf)
• Fine tune segmentation for personalize mobile campaigns (Xtify)
• IBM Interactive Experience
• IBM MobileFirst studios
• Accelerate the mobile transformation journey with industry Solutions (IBM Ready Apps)