Last summer, FlightWorks rolled out FAA-approved Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs), a digital alternative to those bulky printed flight manuals, on about 50 iPads. FlightWorks is using Airwatch's MDM Secure Content Locker system, which is downloaded onto the tablets to protect proprietary data in manuals that have been electronically integrated into the EFBs.
Pilots are required to enter their login credentials through a directory-based authentication layer. Sebring says the app is working well and he hasn't heard of any technical issues with the iPads. He doesn't have figures on hard savings but says the subscription cost of digital navigational charts is lower than the paper subscription, so it is saving FlightWorks a few hundred dollars per aircraft per year. The company has also saved on printing and shipping costs for the manuals.
Now, he says, they have given iPads to technicians to use on the floor to access technical publications via Remote Desktop Protocol, along with an app for maintenance tracking.
Thinking ahead
Chubb is also thinking about new processes to move to mobile as well as ways to enhance its existing mobile apps. Customers can access their policy information from both iOS and Android devices via a mobile app and will soon be able to pay their insurance bills and show proof of coverage on their mobile devices, too, says Ribeiro. "What we keep doing is giving you more reasons to want this application,'' he says.
At the moment, there's no plan to roll out the company's initial app, Chubb Mobile for Personal Insurance, to additional platforms, Ribeiro explains, but they're open to the possibilities down the road, depending on what agents request and what the firm's analytics reveal.
He won't disclose the cost of developing the apps except to say that Chubb designed the back-end architecture with reusable components, and the last app they built -- for agents in Canada, which will go live by the end of March -- took less than 20 hours to assemble.
"Designing the app into a smart architecture has certainly allowed us to save on subsequent builds where we can reuse a lot of that back end," Ribeiro explains. Chubb employees have traditionally used BlackBerrys, but in the past year they have been allowed to purchase and use iOS devices, he says.
At the moment they have around 1,200 corporate BlackBerries and 1,100 corporate iPhones. In 2012 they saw a 30% decline in BlackBerry devices and a 238% increase in iOS-based units. There are currently no plans to support Android "due to the lack of acceptable enterprise data management support on that platform," Ribeiro says.
Agents are finding uses for apps that Ribeiro says Chubb didn't originally think of -- such as giving Chubb Mobile for Personal Insurance to new agents for training purposes. Much of the current corporate literature is in there and is organized for easy access, and all of the content can be viewed in a disconnected mode, Ribeiro says. That means the app can be viewed when users are on an airplane or subway, for example, and don't have network access.
He says they haven't been able to quantify whether Pitchbook has resulted in any new business because "what's still difficult to do on mobile is electronic business analytics. If a device is being used in a disconnected state, it's difficult to track where [agents have] been."
One issue that has arisen as they tie the apps' functionality to other Web-based systems and services: Managing authentication across disparate systems from a mobile app is difficult, Ribeiro says. Certain systems require a multiple sign-on process, but that only happens when "dropping" the user off into a browser-based app that has separate credentials. "We are currently looking at some federated identity options to eliminate this entirely," he says. "Single sign-on is a problem we solved in the Web world years ago, and now we recognize we have to solve that in the mobile world,'' he says.
"We'll never reduce the level of authentication that's needed, but the challenge is getting to everything faster and making it seamless from a user experience while still maintaining the security levels we need," Ribeiro explains.
Today when Chubb builds a new app for the Web, he says the mandate is to think about mobile at the same time. "It's not an afterthought anymore." He says they are using the responsive design model to take into account the form factor of a device and serve up content to it in a way that fits onto the device.
That said, Ribeiro believes some processes will never make it to a mobile app, such as when Chubb issues new workers' compensation policies. These can, in the case of a large firm, include thousands of employees' names and related information that would be very difficult if not impossible to handle in a mobile device. "That form factor will never work for that feature. It's about reducing time and the headache to access information," he says.
Other functions that will likely never see the light of day as mobile apps include CAD/CAM, says Gartner's Finley, since they likely won't work well on a phone or even a tablet. But overall, he says, "It's not going to be question of which apps are going to be made mobile ... it's going to be which apps won't."
Esther Shein is a freelance writer and editor. She can be reached at eshein@shein.net.
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