Enterprise mobility has traditionally been a headache to implement and maintain. Building an app for the enterprise involves many phases: gathering requirements and scope, building the app for multiple devices and operating systems, integrations, authorizations, security, and this is really only the beginning.
The integrations stage in itself takes a lot of time and resources, trying to integrate the mobile app with backend enterprise systems that were never designed for mobility. The lengthy process of gathering technical resources like mobile developers, backend system developers, integration specialists, and having them all work together to build an app takes a ton of resources from the IT department.
Why Enterprise Mobility Needs to be Simplified in 2015
All in all, the traditional way of developing enterprise apps was a major burden on IT departments, and the business users as well. The amount of time it takes to code an app with all these complexities is enormous. As a result, we see a lot of great apps end up in limbo for no other reason than laborious and lengthy development cycles. By the time IT has been able to deploy apps, the business has either moved on to other important issues, or the app no longer meets the needs of the business users, and it’s sent back to the drawing board.
The Pains of Traditional App Development
All of the processes above make enterprise mobility painful enough. But on top of that, there is also the glaring lack of technical resources to build enterprise mobile apps. Depending on the location of the company, a severe lack of available resources can exacerbate the pains of enterprise mobility. It makes it more difficult form companies in locations, such as the Midwest as opposed to developer-rich regions like San Francisco or the Northwest, to build and deploy apps for their organization.
Solving The Problems of Enterprise Mobility in 2015
Simplifying enterprise mobility starts with choosing the right platform for your needs. A comprehensive platform that addresses current needs and is also flexible and scalable for the future will go a long way to making mobility simpler. Using agile methodologies to churn out apps in hours or days instead of weeks and months will make business stakeholders happier and increase user adoption, allowing organizations to scale faster.
Newer technologies, which Gartner calls Rapid Mobile App Development (RMAD) platforms, can be used to mitigate the most painful of these problems. However, not all RMAD’s are created equal and, before a company jumps to implement an RMAD, they should consider the technical capabilities of their top choices, choosing the one that can deliver on their needs.
The Main Differences of RMADs
- Some RMADs use virtualization techniques, which means it will be limited to mobilizing existing business applications by rendering the same application for mobile. However, it will fall short when it comes to redesigning or building new apps involving new processes and leveraging new capabilities of mobile devices.
- Some RMADs provide a drag-n-drop environment for building mobile apps across different devices and operating systems. Many of these, however, fall short when it comes to giving native integrations for backend business systems. Conversely, some RMADs provide good backend integrations, but fall short when it comes to drag-n-drop UI capabilities.
- Very few RMADs, like appsFreedom, provide a complete set of capabilities from native backend integration, to complete drag-n-drop UI development and security capabilities using model-driven architectures.
Simple Means Success in Mobile App Development
In mobile-enabling an enterprise, don’t be afraid to fail. In a mobile app environment, it’s okay to fail on some mobile apps, so that other apps can be better. This is a very different mindset than traditional software projects, in which every app has to be a success.
In the mobile app world, with the right tools, and the willingness to fail, you can be empowered to measure and understand the user needs in order to make all apps better in the future. You shouldn’t be afraid to build mobile apps and possibly dump them the next day and build another app.
This is where the cooperation between IT and business stakeholders becomes critical to simplifying enterprise mobility in the future. Building apps with a platform that allows business users to test and review the apps from the very beginning of the building process drastically increases the efficiency and effectiveness of new apps.
In the end, the tools you use, and how they complement the newer, rapid mobile app development capabilities, while allowing business users to be involved early, will make a huge difference in how simple your enterprise mobility strategy becomes. Test multiple platforms to find the one that best meets your needs, and makes mobility simpler. If you would like to discover how the appsFreedom RMAD platform could perform for you, take a test drive today.