Mobile technology didn’t just spring forth out of the ether one day. From laptops to wearables and every device in between, it’s taken us years to develop the ever-connected world we now live in. Technology didn’t need to go mobile, we did. So why does your smartphone get all the credit for the work you do on the go?

The driving force behind the advance of mobile technology has always been you. As the needs of your business expanded, you embraced any technology capable of streamlining your processes.

Delta Airlines was already a decades-old success when mobile technology came into existence, but this champion of the skies knows an opportunity when it sees one. Driven by the needs of its incredibly mobile workforce, Delta set about replacing all of its manuals, schedules and point of sale (POS) solutions with lighter, cloud-connected devices back in 2013. Now, every Delta flight is outfitted with smartphones in the cabin and tablets in the cockpit.

The result: Delta Airlines has eliminated between 80 and 200 pounds of paperwork from being carried onto each of their flights, resulting in a fuel savings of 1.2 million gallons per year. The airline is also saving a ton on printing (and sparing innumerable trees) by moving these documents to the cloud.

Eliminating the excess baggage of outdated systems isn’t the only way businesses are driving technology. Sometimes the only way to work better is to work faster.

It’s hard to find a quicker-moving team than the crew over at Lotus F1, either on or off the track. With a production cycle shorter than two weeks and team members who regularly travel between the track and the office, the Lotus team has no time to reschedule even a single meeting. From design to production to taking the podium, constant communication is key.

The result: By collaborating via document sharing, chat, and video conference, Lotus F1 can rapidly develop and implement new parts and designs. By collecting and analyzing data from both in-house sources and the industry at large, the team knows when to replace each part and saves on production costs by building only what they need, when they need it.

Your needs are many and the competition is steep, but that’s why your company is the agile, streamlined force it is today. Of course, staying ahead of the pack means constant adaptation. If you want to make the sort of moves that have kept Delta Airlines and Lotus F1 at the top of their fields, we suggest a solution that can both meet your current needs and evolve to meet the unknown challenges of tomorrow.

If you’re looking for solutions that can help your sales, marketing, and service departments produce results faster, we think an adaptive back-end solution like Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online—working in tandem with Office 365 and informed by insights from Power BI—just might be what you’re after. See for yourself: take a guided tour or sign up for a 30-day trial.

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My favorite app in the entire world does only one thing: get me to my train on time. The app itself is a timetable, so right off the bat you might think of it as “nothing special.” Obviously I disagree. In fact, I think my “little train timetable app that could” is a perfect example of what an app needs to be. If you’re looking into creating a new app for your business, then let me explain.

Traditionally, software has been designed so that we have all possible information, options, customization, and data on our screen simultaneously. This is great when you’re trained on the software and need absolutely every available type of functionality it offers. But if you’re looking at a handheld screen while racing to catch the 7:15 express into town, these traditional designs just don’t work.

If I’m going to make my train, I need to know when it’s leaving, what track it’s leaving from, and how to get from here to there fastest, and I need that information delivered to me at a glance. If my eye is distracted by extra data, like how many other seats on the train are booked or which other trains are departing at similar times, I could end up stranded on the platform. Of course, if I were a train conductor a whole different set of information would take precedence—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So what makes a good app? In my mind it comes down to just three things:

User-centric design. Before you start to build your app, you need to think of how people are going to use it. Even the biggest of today’s phones have limited space, and your users aren’t going to want to navigate through menu after menu to get to the functionality they need. Think beyond the information your users need and design your app around how they’re going to use it.

Role-specific functionality. Remember my comment earlier about train conductors not needing the same data as passengers? One way to make sure each person has the right information is to tailor the dashboard within the app by role and size of device. While your data doesn’t change, the way your sales team can see and implement it is wildly different than the way your service department does.

You can even go one step farther, like the folks at Delta Airlines, and design separate apps for each role within your team. For Delta this meant a tablet-based dashboard displaying airspeed, weather events, and telemetry for the pilots, and a smartphone with easy access to the POS system and time-to-destination data for the flight staff.

Seamless, simple interface. No matter your role, when you open an app you expect ease of use. Put simply, if your app “just works” you’re in the sweet spot. While the functionality of your apps may differ, the same need not be true for the way people interact with them. Forget designing specific interfaces for personas like salesperson, consumer, parent, child, etc. If navigating your apps isn’t intuitive, you’ll be hard pressed to get your customers and employees to use them. This goes double for cross-app functionality, by the way. Users don’t care what’s making your apps work together, just that they do.

Not every app can be quite as simple as my beloved train timetable, but they should all strive to at least feel that way. For a deeper dive into the world of apps and mobile solutions, check out our cloud and mobile solutions page.

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