The variety of mobile devices available to consumers is fragmenting business IT approaches, and brokers will increasingly need to devise IT strategies to connect with consumers who are using competing mobile devices in a multiple-app world, a technology research analyst says.
“This choice by people of what [mobile devices] they carry around; when they expect to interact with your business; and when employees want to interact with their employer and the IT systems is really affecting what we are doing inside IT,” said Carl Claunch, a vice president and analyst at the technology research firm Gartner.
“That starts to drive business, because business has to respond to what the customers want. If people are expecting these kinds of intelligent applications, it perhaps requires writing different applications entirely for those different systems.”
For insurance brokers who wish to compete against direct writers in the mobile space, the fragmentation of the growing mobile device market is going to require that they develop IT systems that can seamlessly support all of these mobile platforms, so they have integrated, coherent support experiences for their clients, who are choosing from a wide variety of mobile platforms. Apple’s platform is closed, for example, while Google Android has a hybrid involving several vendors.
Gone are the days when a PC with an X-86 central processing unit (CPU) and a Windows operating system dominated the market, Claunch said, adding that almost half of consumers will soon be on mobile devices instead of personal desktop computers.
“Instead, we now have this fragmentation into multiple worlds,” he said. “We have an Apple-IOS world, and a Google Android with multiple vendors world. There’s Blackberry and Windows and other choices for these smart phones and tablet systems as well. So we are really seeing a fragmentation that means you have to develop IT for multiple environments, not one.”
This move towards fragmentation may push a number of businesses, including brokerages, to interact with several IT vendors, potentially raising their operating costs. It may also push brokers into using cloud computing as a way to integrate information across various platforms, Claunch predicted.
