Enterprise Mobility : Challenges
Lets face it. Enterprise mobility is not a runaway success as most industry pundits predicted a few years ago. It’s primarily because it takes too much effort, budget and resources to build an enterprise app. From user experience to back-end business logic, integration to security and enhancement to app testing, it just takes too long and too many resources to build a quality enterprise app.
As a result, enterprises have been selective in rolling out mobile apps for core applications. Going through business cases, business justifications & ROI, an enterprise today can rollout ~8-10 apps per year, provided they are willing to spend money on resources and dedicated effort towards it. For most enterprises, allocating this kind of a budget is simply not an option and they scrutinize more and mobilize selectively.
This severely cripples user adoption and, hence, mobility success in the enterprise. Business users do not get a choice of mobile apps, do not get enhancements in time and as a result simply do not use the mobile apps. Maybe one or two mobile apps are successfully adopted. But, as the enterprise adds more apps, the adoption rate suffers along with the investment made. Mobilizing a small, selective subset of enterprise apps is a self-defeating approach that leads to mobility failure in an enterprise.
The Secret : Mobilizing En Masse
Measuring success in mobilizing an enterprise works much like a sales and marketing funnel. Not all leads that come are converted into an opportunity and not all opportunities are converted into customers. The trick used for years to increase customers is to put more leads into the sales & marketing funnel so that more customers come out the other side. Enterprise mobility works something like that. The more apps you put into the top of the funnel, the more choices your business users have. They can pick and choose their mobile apps. The more they choose and start using, the more IT gleans usage patterns and focuses on supporting the apps with highest use and greatest value to the organization. This leads to mobility adoption success in the enterprise.
The challenge in building enterprise mobile apps in mass numbers has been the availability of tools & platforms to accomplish this goal efficiently. Lately a new crop of enterprise mobility vendors called RMAD (Rapid Mobile App Development) platforms have sprung up that enable enterprises to rapidly build mobile apps and deploy them faster than ever. These platforms automate the app development process so that enterprise IT can deploy apps faster. There are a variety of RMAD tools available that focus on varied needs – from forms development to mobile virtualization and model-driven development that can be used to quickly build mobile apps.
The appsFreedom Platform is the one RMAD platform that provides a model-driven platform to build enterprise mobile apps faster and more efficiently. The unique feature of the appsFreedom Platform is it mobilizes complete business processes, generating multiple apps, en masse for a single business process in a few clicks. It can truly mobile-enable an enterprise, with its 100’s of business processes, giving lots of app options to its business user base to pick and choose the apps they most need. All of this is accomplished with fewer resources and effort than that required to build a mobile app using traditional development methods.
Sounds too good to be true? Take a test drive to see for yourself!