3. Describe the business processes changed by USAA’s mobile applications before and after the applications were deployed. “How should we go mobile?” Almost every company today is asking that question. In 2014, more people used their mobile phones than PCs to go online, and there is one mobile device for every person on earth in 2015. The number of Web searches performed on mobile devices has more than quadrupled since 2010.

Customers expect, and even demand, to be able to use a mobile device of their choice to obtain information or perform a transaction anywhere and at any time. So if a company wants to stay connected to its customers, it needs some sort of mobile presence.

What do companies do, and where do they start?

Developing mobile apps or a mobile Web site has some special challenges. The user experience on a mobile device is fundamentally different from that on a PC. There are special features on mobile devices such as location-based services that that give firms the potential to interact with customers in meaningful new ways. Firms need to be able to take advantage of those features while delivering an experience that is appropriate to a small screen. There are multiple mobile platforms to work with—iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, and possibly BlackBerry, and a firm may need a different version of an application to run on each of these. You can’t just port a Web site or desktop application to a smartphone or tablet. It’s a different systems development process.