When officers take calls dealing with those populations, they can access the application—and its centralized data on the back end. “They can look up services that may be of help to the person or that are nearby based on the geolocation,” Rapelje said. The critical distinction is that by enabling officers to access this information (which may pertain to a person’s criminal history, personal history, personal data, and more) through the mobile app, they don’t have to directly access it over the public internet, which is less secure. Moreover, they’re not just accessing publicly available internet data, but proprietary enterprise data and knowledge that’s been carefully compiled, organized, and checked for quality and completeness. “We’re talking about being able to access the repository, the content. And that curated data—that curated content repository—is some of the best information of the organization,” Rapelje said. “They can access that over the mobile app.”
A growing demand
The consumerization of information technology is crucial to the mounting cry for the ability to engage with KM systems on mobile devices. Many
people utilize mobile channels in their personal lives for their IT needs. Applying those same channels to the professional sphere of KM is a natural corollary. In order to optimize those interactions for KM practitioners, organizations should design mobile experiences with no- and low-code design tools, like BPM. They should also decide between building one application specific to a particular mobile channel, like a smartphone, and creating a browser-based channel amenable to a variety of mobile devices.
Regardless of which option they select, knowledge managers remain responsible for capturing, refining, and making accessible metadata from those mobile use cases to make information searchable. Once they take into account data protection, regulatory compliance, and data privacy concerns, they can then disseminate that knowledge in the field for convenient, productive experiences for their employees.