When you consider the world of mobility, the application ecosystem is like the air that the inhabitants breathe in order to survive. If you remove mobile applications from the equation, the ‘smart’ devices will lose their brilliance, becoming overpriced feature phones at best. The application economy is what keeps the ‘smartness’ in, allowing these shiny rectangles to achieve far more than just call people. Even in the enterprise domain, the popularity of the mobile devices is because these pieces of code can do wonders in terms of automating and mobilizing so many workflows in the organization.
However, there are a lot of businesses, whose mobility journey does not bear the results that they thought they would, and this leads to heartburn, wasted effort and money, and most importantly, the derailing of business objectives. Why does this happen? To get an answer to that question, we need to dig deeper, and see the impact of the failures, to analyze what expectations were missed.
Impact 1 – Business Disruption
The biggest impact of the unavailability or failure of technology is the impact on the business. There have been numerous reports of the workforce not being able to fulfill their job tasks because the mobile application did not work. This implies that actual business downtime occurred because of the reliance on mobile applications. It is also not surprising, that the impacted teams were not limited to the ones using the application. Other teams and functions in the value chain were also rendered unproductive.
Impact 2 – Missed Deadlines
Consequent to the downtime experienced, the deadlines of technology and business initiatives get impacted. When the stakeholders are unavailable to share data or to collaborate, or are busy completing missed tasks, the rest of the team is left unproductive, causing delays, and misses.
Impact 3 – Loss of Promised Agility
A lot of enterprises buy into the mobile dream because they want to be agile and efficient. The mobile application they so painstakingly build, or pay to have built, is supposed to drive faster innovation and collaboration amongst the operations teams. However, with the application not living up to the expectations, the results are typically much farther from the promise. The people in the field are left high and dry, while the operations managers have to resort to email to allocate work.
Impact 4 - Renouncement of Apps
Lastly, with the broken promises, failed projects, a frustrated workforce, and an embarrassed development team in its wake, the errant applications are abandoned, and the cost written off. This generally is followed by a period where the proponents of mobility in the organizations being unable to meet the gaze of colleagues.
Reasons For Failure:
Now that we understand the widespread impact of a failed mobile application, exploring the reason(s) for the failure is very important. The 2 most common reasons why most of the failed mobile application initiatives fall short are:
1. Lack of coherent strategy: The teams that own the project operate in a functional silo, and are not a part of the larger, enterprise wide strategy. Therefore, the vision of the project did not factor in the impact and integrations with other functions and processes.
2. Integration with backend systems: More often than not, enterprise applications require integration with a number of internal enterprise systems. These integrations need to be planned, designed, implemented, and most importantly, maintained well. A number of times, the integrations stop working when something changes on the internal system.
It has been said before, and it will be said again success of any project lies in planning more than it does in execution. So, in order to avoid failure, plan well, and include the stakeholders early.
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