You see them sponsoring conferences. And something that we found is we were doing the initial research into this, was that even the customers that have chosen to go with some of these products hadn’t necessarily thought that that’s what they wanted to do. They had Googled a variety of phrases and found all these different products and went with what they felt was best, or maybe went with the first thing that they found. And there wasn’t really that place to do a comparison between the different products that wasn’t generated by customer stories. So in the way that any company could potentially artificially improve their online schools for things.

There are those reviewing websites that will do that for software, but obviously, it can be swayed quite easily in one way or another. Or if a company is just not bothered they won’t get any reviews and then they fall quite low down, even if certain products are particularly good. So we wanted to go about finding a way to give that information to people and make it widely available for people to access and make the right decisions for their business.

Do you find that these are targeted towards a specific use case or are these… I hate to call them point solutions because Teams is much broader. I know Workplace from Facebook is much broader, but are they focused as this report, kind of focusing on one specific area? What is that kind of that balance between focused versus broad?

And so these apps were doing the same kinds of thing or different kinds of things at work. And so, we devised what we call the product focus, but it is like a wine chart. So it’s a way to work out what would be kind of woody or fruity to apply that particular focus to an app. And we worked to four areas actually. So communications was one which covered as you say, the kind of central and outwards, but also ways for people to share their own news or to work in a more localized way as well. But then that also kind of merged into the secondary, which is operations. So yes, the working locally does kind of cover on the operational very functional way of working, but it could also be things like health and safety forms have been digitalized and part of the app.

So that kind of form that second part. Then the third part is kind of linked to that again, which was Digital Workplace. So that was more our how the apps can integrate with other systems. So the health and safety forms was in the example of an operational app could be built within the app itself, but the Digital Workplace one could be linking out to a health and safety system actually bringing that through. And then the fourth area was an HR and people area, which was more around e-learning or performance management or pulse surveys, that kind of thing. And we found that no app was a full bar in each of those, we gave her three bars for each one. And none of them were a complete solid circle. It just wasn’t possible to do that.

So we marked each one out of these three bars to give that kind of sense of which direction the app was trying to lean in, or which directions in fact. And that we hope helps people to think which areas of the business need some help? Where are those gaps in our digital workplace, as it stands now that maybe we need something to fill those or to just give an extra edge or to provide a mobile version as well, so people in the front line won’t be sat at desks for large portions of their day. They won’t want to go through really heavy index processes. They want a much lighter and leaner way of doing all sorts of things, including training. So actually, if that’s something that’s an area that’s missing or needs a different approach than a business knows they could lean more towards the HR and people flavor of app.

So, to kind of answer your question in a shorter way, we found that they really varied from app to app. And we quite liked the fact that that market was quite varied so that it can be tailored to a business’s needs.

So a lot of them do have a desktop version and have admin only screens that are on a desktop because that kind of makes sense. But it’s that end user experience, which is completely mobile first and understands those devices, whether that’s a mobile phone or a tablet, of course it could be either one, but just using smaller screens well, understanding how to approach menus, if that is a document library of sorts, how they can approach that. And it’s all about that kind of lighter and leaner ness and making it much easier and quicker to use than an intranet system. That’s actually quite large and broad. It’s like an intranet being like a big toe or something with, with all the different bits and pieces. It’s quite a large and squat and does all sorts of things and don’t get me wrong. Still love intranets as where my heart flies.

It kind of originally, but employee mobile apps, just give that kind of more like a minnow experience. They’re just lighter and quicker. And they allow that kind of facilitation of frontline workers doing their jobs and doing their jobs much quicker and easier, which is always the intention of an intranet as well. But the device difference just means an app can give that quicker experience than an intranet can.

So I think this is still… Although they’ve been around for a few years, they’re still emerging and people don’t necessarily think to target, or I think I need to get an employee mobile app. It’s better for us and an intranet. And we can work out the balance of things. So it’s existing people, but then it is also potentially newer people or your audience that maybe are thinking more along a kind of general communications lines, or do you know that they need to do something for frontline workforce, but they don’t know what that is. And so they can come through us via the knowing about maybe the old product or two, and then wanting to explore in that way.

So their home page is a series of cards, which is the different activities or the different bits of information for the employee to know. So the employee can say all those health and safety training I’ll sign up for that and then swipe the card to get rid of it. And so they just get rid of everything off of their screen, and they know that they’re done is that really kind of operational focused, how to go around the jobs is very kind of in that direction. So it tends to be broken by that a little bit more than the whole industry being geared more in one way than another. They really do vary. There’s a huge amount of difference between the different products. It’s quite incredible. It’s one of the reasons why we’re three eight at that focus chart was to try and wrap our heads around how they all worked and how they could work alongside each other.

And that’s probably how they do is that the way that they are so different compared to maybe intranet products and intranet vendors that have that kind of slightly more thread of similarity running between them and then its features on top of that, that make them different or the UX, it makes them different. Whereas this is the entire flavor of the app that is very different.

It just seems to be very much focused on, okay, then let’s give users the ability to find that app in their respective mobile device, whatever that is, Android, iOS, and then be able to achieve their goal and move on rather rapidly. It really was interesting just to kind of read through some of the things in the report and say, “Oh, wow, this is the way other vendors are going. This is the reason this exists is consumer… The consumer mentality is a very familiar approach. Why not do it in the enterprise?” Did you find that that really kind of each of these apps is self-focused, were there issues with integration or were there are challenges that some of these apps have to address? Immediately the technologist in me thinks security. How do I make those things play across security boundaries or search boundaries, those types of things? Were there are challenges across that? Even though I’m bringing an individual app that’s focused, how do I kind of make it part of the digital workplace whole?

The cost of getting them an account in Active Directory, or to get them a Microsoft account is actually more prohibitive than it is something to explore. So the apps craft ways of getting people onto the system without the need to have those background directory set-up. But it’s all done very securely. So for example, I can’t remember which one it is now, but one of the apps allows a line manager to bring up a QR code on their own phone that the employee can then scan, and then it recognizes they’re all part of the same company. And then the employee can sit there and fill in the details. And then they’re added into the system or the bookkeeper will allow you to print a QR code, and that can go out with a paper payslip or paycheck. So then that’s a way for, again, an individual to get up with paper and scan it and get into the system and to go through the checks with line managers and things, to make sure that it’s all secure.

So you’re right to be concerned because it’s something that people would worry about, but actually, they are all very vigilant and have thought these things through very well to make sure it works well for people to get into the system, but then the security side of things. And they do things like pen testing and all of those things the bigger systems that do as well.

So each one takes out plenty of time to write up and to check through. So it’s quite a hefty report with a lot of detail and yeah, really interesting fields as well. So we’ve tried to give some information in the introduction, just the things that we found and things that are interesting. So hopefully if anybody’s interested in that, it would be useful. It’s a business case, which is always a difficult thing to argue because they will be arguments against these sorts of technologies, but we’ve tried to resolve some of those in the introduction.