Gartner: Three implications of the "post-PC era"

IT leaders must address three key implications of the “post-PC” era as workforces and consumers increasingly access content through mobile devices, warned Gartner.

David Mitchell Smith, research VP and Gartner Fellow, said: “The release of the iPhone five years ago marked a shift towards a mobile-dominated future.

Smith outlined three key implications of this shift and advice, the first being that IT organisations must rapidly evolve mobile applications and interfaces to meet sharp increases in demand.

He said: “This shift in computing to mobile devices, and the ongoing trends of consumerisation and 'bring your own device', mean that IT leaders and application development teams need to take a multichannel approach to applications across business-to-business [B2B], business-to-employee [B2E] and business-to-consumer [B2E] channels.”

To address this, the firm recommended organisations perform a mobile-only, mobile-first or legacy assessment during application development.

Secondly, developers need to retool as mobile-centric design replaces desktop-centric design for user interfaces. Mobile usability is chaning the future of usability, most notably the touch-and-gesture interface, as well as audio and video channels. Organisations must track advances in new UI techniwues and build applications with simple, focused capabilities and interactions, said the firm.

The final implication of the “post-PC era” is that organisations need to reallocate resources following the prediction that mobile advertising projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by four to one by 2015.

Smith explained: “When building UIs for multiple screen sizes and operating systems, new tools are needed to make applications function correctly on different devices. There’s no automatic way to do this — it takes engineering skills to design the right outputs.”

Gartner advised firms to make tactical investments in mobile application development tools.