Mobility Strategy for traditional Industries

CIO Review Magazine

In these times, our day starts with mobile device and if something one wouldn’t want to miss while going out, it would definitely carrying his or her primary phone!! The enterprise is not untouched and from small to big organizations, everywhere mobility is one of the major focus area for sure. Mobility is an important pillar of SMAC (Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud) stack. SMAC is no more a buzzword but new reality almost in all forward looking organizations.

As such Mobile apps are being developed for all the apps in enterprise landscape but most common ones are definitely which is needed on the move - CRM, Email, HRMS, Reporting & Dashboards and other apps which are being driven by location and pictures. So far most successful mobile apps have been Email & CRM and that is due to direct correlation of application need on the move. While most companies have some or other form of Mobility strategy already drawn out, there are still large number of enterprises which are still in flirting stage for mobility apps or just doing it because others are doing it.

Common dilemma in a Mobility strategy starts which Mobile app should be given a preference in terms of priority. One should not just look just at RoI (Return on Investment) like traditional projects but also the consideration should be made on how quickly people can be hooked to it with minimum resistance. Reasons could be user convenience, productivity improvement, operational efficiency, cost saving or better visibility. Thanks to apps like Gmail, Facebook and banking app, employees won’t like any application which has inferior look & feel as well as performance than these apps. Many organizations feel that they would launch an app for field force (most common being for sales force) while there are few organizations who would rather start mobile apps with corporate headquarter to get embraced easily. There are two ways to create mobile application – using mobile website or through native application. While initially browser based app picked up the momentum but over the time everybody is shifting towards the native app.

During my consulting days I have been asked which OS is apt for our mobility app. There is no one answer to this. This will depend on what is the operating system used by target audience. If it is retail audience, Android should be first choice while iOS also commands significant market share, Windows mobile is still in evolution stage. So, typically for internal apps, Android is cost effective while for external apps, one should create with both iOS as well as Android. From stability perspective both apps are equally stable.

Lately there has been lot of Mobile development platforms evolution and it is very important to consider all the factors before choosing a platform. Best ones are where you could develop once and deploy on any platform. Of course Android and apple have their own SDKs to develop apps. There are development platforms which can reduce the app development time to minimum due to easy drag & drop as well as intuitive web services frameworks, one should definitely be evaluating the same. Integration of mobility app with existing application is pretty important in case of Enterprise scenario. There are legacy apps which can’t be easily integrated to the Mobility app and it might be good idea to create a catalyst layer on top of such apps which can further be used to facilitate integration between legacy applications and enterprise mobile apps. Many Enterprise is using mobility app creation as opportunity to fast track the sunset of the legacy applications!

Security is important for any application but when it comes to Mobility apps, just being the new technology one has to put a strategy for security at multiple layers. One of the first things one needs to do is deciding on MDM (Mobile Device Management) tool. Typical features are locating the devices, remote installation and remote wiping off the devices. However containerization is another great feature most people add on to make sure that app data is not compromised. For web services, level of encryption is important factor to consider. Also, the way web services are accessing core apps or data sources should be checked for vulnerability. The data should mostly be stored on server side and in case there are data stored in mobile apps, it should have proper encryption so that the same is not compromised.

Application distribution is another strategy to work before apps are launched. One has to decide whether APK file or executable can be kept at server or need to be pushed through MDM for internal employees. For external audience, Google play store and Apple app store are the primary source for people to download and install app. Larger organizations uses the same even for internal apps but they make sure to add secured certificate along with internal validation before the mobile app can work. Once users have started using the mobile app, Insight is very important to measure the success, trend and usability of the application. Google and Amazon have good mobile app analytics tools but lately more tools are coming for the same. Hosting could be tricky for mobile app and it should be deployed in similar setup like web applications. In many scenarios, public clouds are actually ready for mobile app deployment and biggest advantage it provides is scalability as one doesn’t know in the beginning the scale of Mobile user base.

It is important to create a Mobility Strategy and revisit it every 6 months as newer development platforms, security and integration layers are evolving pretty fast.

Disclaimer - This was my article which was published in CIO Review magazine recently and have also spoken on same topic in Frost Digital Business Summit.