Mobile Apps: Challenges Faced by the Enterprise

Mobility offers tremendous business growth opportunities to a business and its incorporation in enterprises is certainly on the rise, but this does not rule out the challenges that businesses still face when a new technology has to be adopted. Apart from the standard challenges faced during adoption of a new technology platform, mobility presents its own unique challenges.

 

• Complexity and Cost: Unlike the traditional technology world dominated by windows / mac OS, going mobile means grappling with seemingly innumerable device-OS combinations, with even more entering the fray every day. Developing for and managing such a complex landscape means higher development and management costs. Oftentimes, businesses fail to justify the cost against the ROI for mobility, which leads to mobility projects being shelved. There is some reprieve in the cross-platform apps, but it will be some time till they become viable business solutions.
• Quality of the Application: Mobile users are now used to high quality apps, which deliver on both the design and the content front. User interface and performance are the two key factors for engaging the end user. The UI has to be designed keeping the end user in mind while the performance has to meet the enterprise guidelines while being constrained by the project budget.
• Time to Market: Variety of mobile platforms requires the adjustment of the code according to the syntax of the OS, which it supports and executes for operations. This process increases the time of development of enterprise software and hinders the approach of businesses to deliver the product in shortest possible time.
• Back-End Integration: A B2C app should ideally integrate seamlessly with back-end databases and services to deliver content. However, this is easier said than done. The business critical, legacy systems existing within the enterprise were not designed to integrate with mobile interfaces. Existing systems may have to be modified to work together with the mobile apps. Programmable interfaces have to be coded so that these back-end services can talk with apps. This may require the re-writing of the code of server for each application, such re-writing may create issues of communication with the existing systems. In short, going mobile may end up disrupting existing integrations / functionalities, which is of course, not acceptable.
• Software Security: For some crucial applications related to finance or mobile software dealing with corporate data such as CRM, ERP, there is a strong need to secure the app at each level of code. In the haste to launch the app, developers sometimes overlook the security aspects. Any data manipulation or intrusion may cause serious damage to the organization and so developers need to emphasize on embedding the security features of the OS or hard code by themselves.

 

The transformation phase in the easy step to undertake for enterprises, but it is the long term planning, that utilizes all of the resources and puts various tasks to challenge in the overall work-flow. Delivering on these focus areas requires a rethink of the current strategies and creation of new products that would influence the way users interact with enterprise assets.

 

Copper Mobile with its strong domain knowledge and technical expertise, can help your enterprise get the power of mobility. Let us take charge of the Enterprise Application solution, you are looking for and we will ensure that you receive the right kind of product that your organization requires.

Why Enterprise Social Initiatives Fail

In a recent report published by Gartner, 80% of the social initiatives will not fulfill their intended targets by 2015. This, by the same Gartner, that said that the future of enterprise depended on social strategy that would effectively tap the “collective genius” of employees and customers. So does the new report mean they are backpedaling? Not really.

 

The reason most social initiatives will end up in less than projected success is that most enterprises dive headlong into the social projects without taking care of some core issues critical to their success. There are multiple challenges that plague the uptake and success of such endeavors, which if not addressed in the strategy itself, can derail them from the path to success.

 

Focus on People, Not Tool

 

When enterprises plan for collaboration enablement, the focus is on the content and the mechanism of supporting it rather than the real players in the arena, the people. Project teams deliberate for moths trying to decide the ‘best’ social platform out there and the teams that will implement it, while no one is really thinking about how to engage the employees in the collaborative efforts. This leaves them with an expensive, well-implemented (if so) tool, which gathers dust as no one uses it.

 

Team Structure

 

Unlike external social platforms, which seem take a life of their own, corporate collaboration efforts need to be constantly monitored, advertised, supported, and evolved as time progresses. To address this, they require a defined team that owns and manages them. Roles like a collaboration manager, or an innovation architect should be defined to lead this team into the future. Another important component here is the ranking of the participants based on their contributions.

 

Training and Enablement

 

Most enterprise project plans for information management and distribution leave out the most critical part of the exercise – end user training. Give a user, who is unmotivated in the first place, a tool that he does not understand, and you can bid goodbye to its success. There are multiple training options available to the management – classroom based training, computer based live training, computer based recorded sessions, training presentations, and user manuals. Even after this, if the employees do not get trained, there is some problem.

 

Incentives and Engagement

 

Most people’s approach towards enterprise social platforms is that they have “better things to do”. The primary reason for this is that they do not feel incented to contribute. Another reason is that the exercise of contribution is not engaging enough, and people who do contribute, stop doing so after a few participations.This is where the team managing the social initiative should come up with creative incentive programs for the contributors. Some examples of the same are giving badges or honors, promoting the users within the tool to hold cool titles, having a physical award ceremony for top contributors, or, if your workforce allows it, associating KRA metrics with it. To make the employees covet participation, the community may be started as ‘by invitation only’. Once this core group reaches a certain critical mass of activity, you can open it up, and add more people.

 

Technology Does Matter

 

Finally, even though not the top priority, the importance of choosing the right collaboration platform can’t be denied. The interfaces should be simple and intuitive, the platform secure, and manageable. The cost of implementation, integration and support of the same should not be too high to be prohibitive.

 

The Verdict

 

While it is true that the success of the social initiatives in place or being implemented is questionable, it is also true that they are the future. By reworking their strategy, and paying heed to sound advice, companies can prepare for success in the world where collaboration rules that is inevitable.

 

Copper Mobile is an app development company with headquarters in Dallas. The firm is one of the top iPhone application development firms and mobile application development companies in Dallas

Demystifying the Cloud

It is hard these days to pick up a technology magazine or to read an IT blog without coming across reference to “the cloud”. From novices to pundits, everyone is talking about the cloud. The problem is not everyone agrees on what cloud is, or what its impact is on the modern IT landscape.

 

Blind Man’s Elephant?

 

Cloud computing today can be best described as a blind man’s elephant. The perception, understanding and reality of Cloud depend on who is selling it, and who is buying it.

 

This confused state of affairs is further aggravated by the vendors in the IT marketplace. Today, everyone from a hardware vendor to a software product company to a services organization call what they sell "Cloud".

 

The customers are not far behind in escalating the situation. Driven by the pressure from the business to invest in cloud, IT organizations have taken to calling their existing execution models as Cloud.

 

Due to all this focus on wordplay, everything from managed services to hardware lease models, to virtualized infrastructure, to innovative sourcing / financial models today are referred to as "Cloud".

 

A Part vs the Whole

 

Almost every time a customer talks about needing a "Cloud" model, they are referring to a 'feature' that cloud provides, and which can generally be easily achieved within their existing landscape.

 

For e.g., when a customer says that he wants cloud to take the assets off his books, he is looking for an OPEX vs. a CAPEX. This can be done through asset leasing / IaaS providers. Similarly, when customers ask for speed of provisioning / asset reclaim, the same can easily be achieved through higher virtualization and some automation tools.

 

True, cloud provides features like scalability, self-service, elasticity, utility / usage based pricing, agility, better resource utilization, code movement and metering among many others, but any one (or more) of these features in a solution do not a cloud make. High degree of virtualization is NOT cloud. Paying for a server over a period of time instead of upfront is NOT cloud. Hosted, managed services is NOT cloud. Pay-per-use is NOT cloud. And simply attaching ‘as a service(aaS)’ behind a traditional service is most certainly NOT cloud.

 

Defining Cloud

 

In simple English, cloud refers to technology delivery framework where the collective capacity of multiple IT components like Servers, Storage, Network devices etc. is made available to the user(s) on a per unit usage basis over the internet.

 

A true "Cloud" model is architecturally different from traditional IT landscape, and often has its own development and management platforms. There are primarily 3 flavors of cloud available today, and they can be viewed in a simple hierarchical model of Infrastructure, OS + Development platform and Application:

 

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): OS down capacity provided in utility model

Platform as a service (PaaS): Dev platform down capacity provided in utility model

Software as a service (SaaS): Application down capacity provided in utility model

 

These 3 flavors can be deployed either in a large, sophisticated datacenter owned by a single organization, and shared among multiple customers, or in the datacenter of an enterprise and used by only the people in the same organization. The first model is known as a Public Cloud while the second is known as a Private Cloud.

 

Final Word:

 

It is important to understand that the cloud computing industry represents a large ecosystem of many models, vendors, and market niches. This definition attempts to encompass all of the various cloud approaches. Further, Cloud computing is still an evolving paradigm. Its definitions use cases, underlying technologies, issues, risks, and benefits will be refined in a spirited debate by the public and private sectors. These definitions, attributes, and characteristics will evolve and change over time.

 

Copper Mobile is a mobile application development firm, with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. The company has made its niche as one of top iPhone app developers in Dallas and mobile application companies in Noida