Guest Post: How C-level execs are going mobile

by Jeffrey Vocell, co-founder of Trendslide

Executives today are increasingly busy and getting pulled in all different directions. With ‘to do’ lists getting longer, and hours available in the day not following suit – the C-level exec is turning to mobile to keep up. Given the explosive growth of mobile (which for the sake of this post we’ll count as both tablets and smartphones) it’s apparent that life for the C-level exec will never be the same. According to a Dimensional Research survey, 71 per cent of SMB’s [Small-to-Medium Businesses] surveyed are using tablets for work-productivity related tasks. Apps and the mobile web have been the biggest change allowing productivity related tasks that weren’t possible before to seamlessly be completed on a smartphone or tablet. Let’s look at some of the common tasks below to examine the impact of mobile on executives. Email

Email has been one of the primary use cases of mobile devices since the first smartphones were released.

Executives quickly picked up on this and the BlackBerry became the device of choice, as it was IT friendly and an easy way to handle business from anywhere.

For year’s executives were stuck with just access to email and basic support for attachments. However, now a new class of apps has arrived that is changing everything.

Spreadsheets

Executives are now creating, managing and distributing content, planning, financials and more via recent spreadsheet tools and web-based platforms.

Google Docs, Office 365 and a recent spreadsheet startup, Grid by Binary Thum, are great examples of the innovation happening in this space and show off the power for executives using these devices for productivity.

Sales / CRM

In most cases your CRM provider is likely have a mobile app. Salesforce is one of the most popular and has a good app that helps monitor contact level details.

Need to get in touch with a customer or check in on a sales rep while you’re on the road?

It’s just as easy as opening your CRM application and in a few taps getting the information you need.

One piece many of these CRM applications are not good at is trend analysis or presenting a dashboard of how your company is doing, but we’ll cover that later.

Travel

There are apps in this category for everything from finding flights, booking rental cars / finding a taxi, to filing expense reports.

The key point is the discovery and manual paperwork element of expense reports and tasks is quickly disappearing with services that take care of it all electronically and will sync up with your existing business sources.

Dashboard / Analytics

Executives now are monitoring business performance right from their mobile device with apps from companies such as Trendslide helping monitor and present the most important and relevant information.

It’s no longer about a stack of reports or a confusing Excel spreadsheet that is difficult to understand – within minutes business performance can be understood, and action taken from anywhere and anytime.

This is a huge shift as executives no longer have to wait until their next staff meeting to understand that ‘opportunities being won’ are plummeting and can begin to address it immediately.

In summary, mobile is affecting the C-level exec in the following ways: -

 Information accessibility
 Proactive awareness of the ‘whole picture view’
 Increased performance
 Time and speed to decision, and cost-savings

How has mobile changed your workplace dynamic? Please leave me comments below.

Author biog

Jeffrey Vocell is co-founder of mobile dashboard startup, Trendslide and frequently writes  about how mobile is changing today’s business landscape. Jeffrey is passionate about business performance, optimisation, and analytics and is building the future of executive dashboards with Trendslide.