Tag: cloud

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Is Your Organization Mobile Ready?

Mobile nowadays has become more front and center in the enterprise landscape. It is both directly and indirectly creating new revenue or strengthening the existing revenue streams. Companies that listen and respond properly to mobile trends can win competitive advantages. Is your organization mobile ready

Here are five key questions to ask as you prepare for your company to go mobile.

1. Is your business model mobile ready?

It’s apparent that mobile is now everywhere and significantly changing the way businesses operate. It is considered to postdate the days of personal computers and is becoming the main tool of the business workforce. All stakeholders who are influencing your business, including customers, business partners and employees, are also profoundly being influenced by mobile technologies. They are going mobile. New work flows and connection patterns are being created among your business influencers. Customer demands are getting more sophisticated with all the mobile options, which may force your company to reexamine a lot of things, including its business model, to reposition where it is in the value chain. Revenue streams are shifting to where the mobile involvement is, and you have to refine your business model accordingly to keep your customer happy as well as catch new opportunities. Mobile is where the customers are, so that’s where you need to be.

2. Is your infrastructure mobile ready?

A research study from IBM states that 91 percent of mobile users always keep their mobile devices within a reachable distance. It implies that users want the ability to access applications and services everywhere, whenever they are needed and of course as quickly as possible. This challenges your infrastructure in terms of availability, performance and responsiveness to the explosive number of requests.

The wide adoption of mobile devices also challenges your current system’s architecture. Technically, services that have been exposed outside of the enterprise might not be suitable for mobile requests because in responding to the requests from a mobile environment, which is typically limited in computing resources, the data being transferred back should be lightweight enough that it can be effectively consumed by mobile applications to provide the expected user experience.

Additionally, the diversity of mobile platforms that involve platform owners in operating some useful services (for example C2DM or APNS, the users’ service providers and so forth) would require your enterprise system to be adapted to interact with those external systems effectively and securely.

3. Have you considered security?

Security has always been a big concern when enabling an enterprise to go mobile. Controlling security for mobile is getting more and more challenging due to the natural portability of the mobile environment as well as the constantly growing diversity of mobile platforms and mobile applications. It consequently requires an efficient approach from the strategic level with clearly defined mobile use cases in the business context. This in turn helps the enterprise to build up a comprehensive mobile security policy to more detailed levels, like how to use technologies for implementing the policy and how to make mobile users aware of security threats and regularly educate them to follow security practices to protect themselves and the corporation. That circle from strategy to policy to technology and education should incrementally, iteratively evolve to keep your security strategy up to date and ensure that it reflects your business needs.

4. Is your design approach and concept mobile adequate?

Mobile devices are typically made with smaller screens and are several times less powerful than desktop computers in terms of computing resources, yet the activities performed on mobile require a sense of immediacy. They tend to be tactical in nature. As a result, the interaction flow between the user and the mobile application requires a completely new user experience design mindset. Data presented on mobile needs to be somehow contextualized and condensed to convey as much information as possible and to best utilize less network bandwidth and hardware resources. There is no room for redundancy. Information and an application’s features need to be progressively, selectively displayed.

Design approaches applied for desktop are consequently inadequate for the mobile environment, not only from the user interface perspective but also from code design since the same code would not run on mobile as effectively as on desktop. It needs to be leaner.

Mobile is becoming mainstream in the workforce, and a mobile application is no longer simply a smaller, zoomed-in version of your desktop application. Applying an appropriate design mindset will make your mobile application, the heart of your mobile business model, more attractive to help you meet user expectations and gain a competitive advantage.

5. Is your application development process mobile suitable?

Mobile devices and platforms evolve rapidly, and your app consequently needs to adapt quickly to those changes in order to continuously gain user satisfaction. In other words, mobile apps are written, used and replaced at a much higher rate than traditional enterprise apps. That requires your development process to be refined so that your app will be iteratively delivered more quickly without sacrificing quality.

Additionally, mobile user expectations are very high, yet loyalty is low. They will easily forget your app if they cannot find what they need on the very first try on their tiny mobile devices. In order to continuously make sure your app satisfies its users and keeps them using the apps, you need to get them involved in the development of the apps earlier, interact with them more frequently to get feedback and then meet their expectations promptly—period.

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What could go wrong with your enterprise mobile application?

Developing and releasing mobile applications can be a difficult business, especially in the enterprise context, with a lot of expectations and constraints. In this post we’ll talk about some common challenges you may have with enterprise mobile applications.

You cannot smoothly deploy and distribute your app

When an app is ready for release, you might be stuck at how to move forward with deploying it because you did not take into account some critical dependencies on a platform-specific deployment process. For example, if you want to host your app in a public app store, you need to mindfully consider the approvals process of the app store owner, the audits your app needs and the app’s capabilities once it’s deployed there due to the deployment constraints. If the app is going to be deployed in an enterprise app store, in many cases you need to know how to get enrolled into the proper developer programs as well as how to provision and profile your app accordingly. You need to be aware of the dependencies of the app on the mobile device management (MDM) platform that your organization is using.

Also, you need to consider the download size of your app, what part of the app should be bundled into the installation package, what part should be distributed later as the user uses the app and so forth. You might also be struggling with how to inform your users about a new version of your app and how to have it conveniently updated on their devices. All of these can obviously create problems that may impact your deployment plan.

Your app crashes, freezes or behaves weirdly

A poor testing plan that did not sufficiently cover all the aspects of your app when it goes live usually causes the quality issues. With the wide adoption of bring your own device (BYOD) in the enterprise, testing becomes a huge, challenging task in mobile app development due to the diversity of mobile devices and operating systems in the market.

Even though simulators are your friends they can’t substitute for real devices. Manual testing, or interactive testing, which involves real human beings trying the app on real devices, is still a crucial testing method even though it is expensive and requires a lot of effort. You should incrementally involve users from different departments in the testing cycle to make sure your app is frequently tested before rolling it out at the corporate level. Manual interactive testing works best in many scenarios, especially nonfunctional testing like performance and user experience evaluation. You may also want to consider testing in the wild with poor connection or battery draining; device-specific testing on resolution and orientation; or even testing with different carriers, which could cause strange behavior in your app.

Your app is too complex

One of the common pitfalls is putting too many features that involve resource-consuming functions into a single mobile app, which complicates navigation within the app, challenges the user or drains the battery quickly. Due to the natural small screen of the mobile device and its limited computing resources I recommend that you make your mobile app as simple and lightweight as possible in terms of functionality and resource consumption so that the battery won’t be drained even before the user gets used to the app. User satisfaction is usually higher when an app has fewer but better-defined functions, rather than a broad range of complicated features. The user’s expectation usually includes the ability to conveniently complete complex tasks in the simplest way possible.

Your app’s usability is poor

Enterprise apps usually do not get enough focus on user experience design and are not typically as polished as consumer apps. Meanwhile, employees still expect to have an equivalent level of usability. Even though enterprise mobile apps often have a different mission and have more going on than consumer apps, they share the same challenges when used on mobile devices.

The usability expectation is that apps be intuitive and easy to use. It’s reasonable if the users ignore your app because of its lack of user-friendly design, poor navigation experience and so forth. The mobile application also should not be data intensive and should help your employees to easily browse its functionalities and get results instantly.

You lack support and maintenance or a way to track results

Perhaps your users do not know how and where to get help when they have trouble using the app. Or the users have the app, but no one is following up to see if it’s being used, how often it’s being used and if people are happy about the app.

It’s crucial to plan for app usage statistics and a feedback recorder up front and to spend effort on analyzing and managing them to continuously address users’ concerns and feedback. App analytic is critical to keep your mobile app essential to its users and drive your users’ satisfaction to meet the business needs.

The last stage of your mobile app is not deployment. It’s ongoing support, a learning effort to know what works and doesn’t work for your users, in context, to better ensure the business value of your app.

To avoid most of these headaches, you need a comprehensive mobile application life-cycle management approach that is sufficient for your needs and can offer agility to your enterprise. And that’s where IBM MobileFirst can help with its mobile application development life-cycle offering.