There's a gold rush in mobile application development with every business wanting to ride the mobility wave. Businesses are attracted to mobile media because of the perceived increase in customer outreach and revenue. But not many consider the nitty-gritty that goes into making successful corporate mobile apps.
What makes mobility work for some businesses? It's the recognition of "mobile moments" and a sound mobile strategy. Mobile moments, a term coined by Adolf Allesch, Chief Innovation Architect at IBM, can include opportunities, situations, and processes that will add value to users, the ecosystem and the business by going mobile.
Mobile moments for value:
A mobile moment rides on multiple selling points including an enterprise mobile app's meaningful use of device features such as GPS, camera, microphone, etc.; a simple yet effective user interface that drives adoption; and the inclusion of features that support either or all of the following:
• Higher employee productivity
• Real-time collaboration
• Timely decision-making
• Upselling or cross-selling
• Customer or employee engagement
• Enhanced customer offerings
• Knowledge distribution
• Context-based functions
• Business analysis
• Greater profit
Creating mobile moments requires extensive and complex computations. That's why a mobile strategy is critical.
Mobile strategy for success
Before devising a mobile strategy, business heads need to brainstorm with department heads, line managers and end users to identify requirements that can create mobile moments. This exercise helps to define the scope, number and types (internal and external) of corporate apps that you need to target.
The second step involves breaking down ideas into concrete steps. This is done by matching needs with feasibility, and answering questions such as:
• Who is your target audience?
Diverse audience types across sectors or regions may need to be addressed and managed differently. The design of consumer apps will also vary significantly from employee apps.
• Which mobile devices will you target?
More the device types, higher the cost, resource consumption and effort of app development, deployment, and device management.
• Will a web app on a mobile browser work or a hybrid or native mobile app?
Web apps work well if your primary focus is cross-device availability, and lower MDM complexity and TCO. However, for a rich user experience, native apps work best though that also increases development, deployment and management expenses.
• What are the budget, time and technical boundaries for mobile apps?
Apart from time, cost and resources, you need to know what infrastructural changes may be needed to support mobile application usage - extra traffic generation, MDM, etc.
Mobile moments drive returns and app adoption. A sound mobile strategy is a must to take an app from ideation to deployment to ensure its relevance, usability, effectiveness, performance, and contextual value addition.
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