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These days, a successful app saves time and enables quick and easy access to its features. It’s available anywhere and at any time with relevant contextual experiences. It allows your customer to control the interaction and offers both flawless uptime and minimal power use.

And perhaps most critically, a successful app fits both your business and your customers like a glove — something that requires app customization.

As I delineated in my last post , the payoffs can — and should — be substantial. Customized mobile apps in particular lower costs, improve employee productivity, and significantly strengthen your relationship with your customers.

How important are apps to your business?

If your enterprise is like most, the answer is VERY. And the chief reason centers on the rising importance of mobile “presence.” Without such presence, just about every business will soon struggle to compete.

Sometimes, however, not even a good mobile app is enough, because app users — which is to say, your customers — have become demanding. And picky.

As I noted in my last post, new information technologies are likely to impact your business sooner than you’d like, so remaining reactive and focused on only the short-term has never been more dangerous.

You need to generate a forward-looking digital strategy to keep your enterprise competitive. If you find this easier said than done, you’re not alone — only about a quarter of businesses have a coherent digital strategy .

Yet without the IT planning that produces an effective digital strategy, you face a real possibility of surprise technological disruption in your industry and to your enterprise.

Anyone familiar with Uber or Airbnb will agree that well-deployed disruptive technologies can be dramatic and industry-upending. Even so, if your business earns its living far from such events, you may think you have years yet before needing to deal with “anything like that.”

You might want to think again, however. This season’s analyst predictions about 2016* stand out for their warnings about the reach and speed of disruptive technologies.

Across most enterprises — even the very small — information technology is changing how business is done. Ignoring or rejecting these technologies merely puts your organization behind the competitive eight-ball.

But knowing which technologies to pay attention to — and when — depends on such factors as the economic sector in which your business operates, financial constraints, your appetite for risk, your thirst for opportunity, and a whole lot more. Add up all these factors and the resulting mix is entirely unique. Now you have to figure out the impact those large waves of technological change will have.

More than ever, the key to a company’s success centers on its effective use of information technology, so choosing the right providers is essential for today’s technology decision maker. Yet the complexities of today’s technologies, the unending hype, and the ever-changing mix of vendors make it tough to navigate your way to the right partner. So where to begin? As readers of this blog know, I encourage clients to first examine their needs and goals. This is something you should