An effective enterprise mobility program is all about employees' access to mobile applications. While it used to be enough to have remote access to email and calendars, mobility has morphed into a more important segment of many businesses that is largely dependent on apps.

That's why, according to a recent Business 2 Community report, it's important for organizations to be vigilant when deploying and releasing new mobile apps to the workforce. With wireless expense management in mind, a company will want to avoid investing heavily in solutions, only to find out later they fell short of expectations and requirements.

"The triangle of IT consumerization, mobility and cloud computing is shaping a new reality for professionals everywhere," the report began. "The tools of the trade for this evolving breed of mobile web workers are predominantly the smartphone and the apps running on it."

So far, many of the nearly 1 million apps offered in the various marketplaces available to mobile end users are consumer-focused. While calorie counting and virtual games are good for passing time on a smartphone, neither will do much in the way of making the mobile workforce any more productive.

That's why due diligence is needed on the part of companies when looking for apps to hand over to employees. Otherwise they run the risk of turning the devices into nothing more than expensive gaming consoles, while all efforts for wireless expense management are lost.

"For sales persons to adopt a mobile enterprise app, of any kind, it’s not enough for it to offer a mobile-optimized experience that is bloat-free," the news source warned. "It must also interact well with the relevant enterprise system of record."

As more companies deploy smartphones and a greater percentage of employees goes mobile, Business 2 Community predicted that more enterprise-aware and highly specialized apps will be made available. After all, consumerization, the cloud and mobility have all moved far beyond buzzword status to encompass trends that are reshaping the mold for enterprise IT and how companies conduct their business.

In June, ABI Research revealed that enterprise application use is set to experience compound annual growth of 90 percent during the next five years. That would mean that the number of users of business-to-customer and business-to-employee apps would reach 830 million around the world.