As a millennial, I love my mobile device. I communicate, play, share, take pictures, write down ideas, keep myself informed, pay my bills, do work with it, and more. I do this quicker and, most of the time, using a friendlier interface, than on my laptop. The best part: I can do all of those things everywhere, everytime. Does my mobile replace my laptop today? Almost. Will my mobile replace my laptop in the future? Probably.
Being 25 years old means that I grew up with a mouse in my hand. I had the chance to get the Internet at home in the mid-90’s, and thus, I was part of the first generation of students to have Internet for my entire school experience. In 2008, a new game changer landed in my other hand: my first smartphone. It was incredible! Everything I was able to do at home could be done on the go. Everything? Not really. Working on a smartphone was, and still is, not as easy as on a laptop. Multiple factors might explain this situation:
- The new paradigms introduced by the touch screen, the size of the screen or even the limited access to a file management system had/have to be adopted by developers.
- Even if the productivity category was there since the AppStore launch, the productivity market was not a priority. In fact, except Blackberry, major smartphones vendors put more communication effort in the general public than on the business one.
- The enterprise world has some specific needs in device management and security solutions which only starts to come in.
- And more.
This led most working people to consider a mobile device as a data consumption access point prior to a data creation one.
Nevertheless, things are moving forward. Workers are working off-site more and more, and realize they can fill the precious spare minutes by working on their mobile device. The combination of strategic deals between major companies (MobileFirst, AppConfig, SAP x Apple, etc) and giant leaps in security and management platforms on which we can lean on make us believe in a new working era.
Developing Collibra On-the-Go mobile is a challenge. It forces us to re-think all our features in terms of graphical interface, user experience, and performance. By bringing a smart and fast search, our users get the ability to access key data of their company everywhere. The introduction of comments on the go lets them interact with each other. Dashboards, on the other hand, gave on-the-go executives the ability to quickly check their key data governance KPI’s and take action. This set of features is great for data consumption, but we missed the creation part to become a great “for work” application.
Bringing workflows and tasks on the go was the missing keystone for a day-to-day productivity mobile application. In a couple of seconds, between two meetings, during transit, or while waiting in a queue, every data citizen can now handle her/his tasks right on his mobile device. Whenever an issue pops up, just trigger the appropriate workflow to raise it. Whenever an idea comes in, just make it happen.
In the future, we will continue to improve the user experience, productivity, and trust to make Collibra On-the-Go the primary access point when out of the office. This implies:
- Focusing on security, especially allowing the authentication through an external system and being certified as a secured mobile app.
- Leveraging the usage of our mobile app in large organizations by supporting the major enterprise mobility management (EMM) platforms.
- Optimizing the Collibra 5.0 experience and extending Collibra Catalog on the go by allowing users to shop for data sets directly from their smartphones or tablets.
- Extending the number of supported platforms: by building a dedicated interface for bigger screens such as tablets and laptop. This will lead us to new possibilities and paradigm such as enabling data lineage on the go.
