Developing and deploying an innovative enterprise mobility strategy for your business can be a lengthy process but one that will empower your workforce and give them access to enterprise data. However, it’s critical that before jumping into the development process you consider there a number of factors to ensure your enterprise is ready for a mobile solution.
By understanding the role mobile can play within your enterprise, it will enable a quicker and far simpler implementation along with a smoother deployment process. We’ve rounded up four key elements to consider when you’re planning an enterprise mobility strategy.
Determine the App User
Developing the persona for your audience is a great place to start when planning out a mobile strategy. If more than one application is needed, a roadmap can developed to implement all the desired apps on an appropriate schedule.
By defining your ideal user, the app stands more chance of being a success in terms of adoption rates. It also helps identify whether it will be an internal or external application and will affect how it is deployed and accessed.
Understanding your desired audience at such an early stage will help with decisions further down the development line.
What’s the Objective?
Your enterprise needs to understand the objective of the application. In establishing what an application might be developed to achieve, it is important to be able to identify the needs, pressures, pains and struggles within your business. It is a good idea to agree what it is that the development will be designed to achieve and deliver and to establish the role of mobile.
Clearly, having an idea has to be the first step, but it isn’t enough to have an idea for the sake of developing an app. The app needs to complement and improve experiences at the point of delivery. It should be a pre-requisite that it will add value to the process and improve the working day for users. It should satisfy a need or solve a problem.
Put simply, the app should be a “must have” rather than a “nice to have”. Understanding what the goal for the app is will help focus on the outcome from the outset. Development of a business case with clearly defined benefits will help “sell” the concept to end users.
Choose the Platforms
It’s worth considering each platform’s strengths before making a firm decision. iOS is certainly a popular choice due to the popularity of Apple devices and the reputation it brings with it. However, Android devices do outnumber iOS devices in the market and the increasing demand for BYOD policies has seen them being used more and more in the enterprise.
Windows and BlackBerry devices are also worth considering but are playing catch up. An enterprise should have a good idea of which platform/s they wish to target. By narrowing it down to just one platform, it will reduce the costs but will also decrease the likelihood of universal adoption.
Native vs Hybrid
There is no set rule for Native vs Hybrid, and often it comes down to the specific requirements of a project, along with other constraints including time and budgets. This will allow you to put forward a course of action, which is commercially viable and satisfies the project requirements.
In the past, Hybrid developments were seen as the poorer cousin of a full scale native development, and they looked it. But as the technology moves forward, usability is improving, and so is the functionality that can be achieved. So much so that there is very few explicit functionality advantages to blindly recommending a native development.
It is important to understand the intricacies surrounding project requirements, building out a viable roll-out strategy to ensure the best solutions are deployed.