Mobile App Use High but Satisfaction Low

Quickbase, an enterprise cloud database offering from Intuit, released the results of a survey of 448 "information workers" from companies with at least 100 employees about their use of cloud applications.

Forty percent of respondents say they use a mobile device for work; most of these were mid-level managers. On average, respondents say they use five mobile business apps to manage their day-to-day business tasks; 58 percent of their mobile apps come from their company’s IT department, another 37 percent were purchased or downloaded from an app store. However, a third of these users said the apps don't adequately meet their needs.

What they want is a way to build their own mobile apps; over half (53 percent) "said they would build an app if they could do so easily."  Over 40 percent said such a homegrown app would be used primarily for management and collaboration functions.  What's getting in their way?  Well, the first reason is obvious -- their inability to write code.  Another impediment: the lack of IT approval.

(Full disclosure: A few years ago we experimented with Quickbase for the first time; in less than 10 minutes I had built a custom database application running in the cloud to track ESJ articles.  As a former enterprise applications programmer and novice database developer, I was mightily impressed with the ease of development, its flexibility, and its speed of execution.  We continue to use the application we developed to this day.)

-- James E. Powell
Editorial Director, ESJ

Posted on 11/14/2012