In a bid to successfully create effective mobile apps, many corporate technology teams appear to be falling all over themselves. They outsource their app development projects to outside experts due to the scarcity of internal talent. But could this be a misplacement of focus?
Generally, mobile apps are categorized into two classes. While some development projects are established as attempts to streamline business processes, others are basically designed to get prospects or customers engaged. As mobile users continue to call for more mobile apps, there is an increasing need for enterprises to develop an effective mobile app strategy that can meet up to their demands.
These days, most businesses are seeking to prioritize their mobile apps due to the shortage of development talent. Now, they are employing a set of universal application development tools to develop a workable mobile app strategy capable of invading the enterprise. At this point, it’s rather more important to include mobile applications that really bring value to the enterprise.
Before now, attention was mainly focused on managing devices and ensuring that users could easily access their contacts, calendar, and email. But as touching the focus of mobility in the enterprise, there has been a major alteration. While some organizations are yet to decide on developing mobile applications, some others still have doubts about the need to deploy them. Nevertheless, there are still a handful of enterprises that simply prefer to take a wait-and-see approach.
The most comprehensive way to ensure that mobile apps and the vital information they contain are safe even in an unsafe digital environment is through the organization of effective development strategies.
For businesses developing and deploying applications internally or externally to customers, there are certain tools to consider. To every effective mobile application strategy, there are at least 3 major parts to consider.
– Establishing standards and governance
– Selecting universal application development tools
– Prioritizing the components of an app portfolio
Establish Governance and Standards
When it comes to governance and standards of mobile application practices and policies across a given enterprise, there is the need of creating an app portfolio and a standard toolbox of application development tools. It is only through this means that the mobile app development strategy can remain consistent through the enterprise.
As a matter of fact, this process helps to ensure that every mobile request is securely captured and rightly evaluated before delivering apps to the target audience. In a bid to prevent enterprises from running into fragmented, unmanageable mobile efforts, governance and standards go a long way in helping to encourage knowledge sharing, foster reusability, define measures, maintain expectations, and manage app support across the organization.
Just to let you know, this process is not meant to impede the process of completing mobile initiatives or suppress innovation. Rather, governance and standards are established to ensure that mobile apps and devices can be measurable, securely, and consistently deployed by relevant business units.
Regardless of who is developing and deploying the mobile applications, security standards, access to corporate resources, reusable components, and reference architectures can all be utilized effectively to foster consistency.
Select Universal App Development Tools
In order to meet every of their mobile application objectives, most organizations will require some significant level of custom application development. However, there is variance as to how these organizations will meet their needs. While some may want to outsource, others may choose to do this through internal development.
However, this should help standardize the application development tools so as to get everyone familiarized with them regardless of the approach taken. Since everything is universal, the act of selecting a set of tools usable by all mobile app developers goes a long way in facilitating and enhancing portability, training, support, iterations and updates.
In most cases, enterprises may choose to use specific development tools to develop a toolbox that could be used for some specific types of apps. As a matter of fact, it is important to understand that there is no single tool that can truly meet the needs or requirements of all the major types of applications.
Ideally, it’s best for developers to decide on a standard group for each type of app since cross-platform, native, hybrid, and mobile web applications each have their own set of available tools.
Prioritize the Application Portfolio
Enterprises in generally are comprised of several different lines of businesses which come along with many different requirements and needs for mobile apps. Whether an enterprise plans to outsource projects, buy off-the-shelf products or even handle the development process themselves (i.e. internally), app developers need to identify the range of mobile opportunities and get them prioritized.
The prioritization of the constituents of the application portfolio should be considered as an objective process that should highlight the objectives of each initiative. In order to effectively prioritize the application portfolio, Indian app developers will have to determine the application initiatives that convey the highest value to the enterprise before deciding on how they can be aligned with the overall objectives of the business.
Before commencing the prioritization process, app developers India should have their predetermined evaluation criteria already set up. For instance, they may decide to either look for apps for specific units of the enterprise or seek to develop apps that work across several mobile operating platforms.
The entire organization can easily gain visibility into the mobile app of the business by simply documenting each opportunity. Basically, visibility helps other parts of the enterprise to have a realistic view of what others are doing. Two groups working on the same initiative can easily make use of the portfolio to share both resources and knowledge which in turn helps to save money and time.
As part of efforts aimed at meeting users’ expectations and needs, there is an immediate need to adopt a viable mobile app strategy that can fulfill all business requirements. To this end, there is a growing demand for mobile apps and in years to come, there will be a significant increase in the presence of mobile apps in the enterprise.
Rather than being strategic many organizations’ mobile apps are becoming tactical due to increasing difficulty that currently hinders them from becoming proactive against competitive pressures. It is critically important to consider all the various factors needed for prioritizing a mobile application through intelligent development decisions.
To be able to control and make mobile apps work profitably, there is the need for every organization to have at least a succinct understanding on how to manage application demand. There is no other way to achieve this than possessing a well-defined, recognized, and expressed mobile app strategy.
