Tuesday 26 March 2013

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.

No comments:

Post a Comment