9 things to consider for your enterprise mobile strategy

Both business and employees are rapidly moving to smartphones and tablets to get their work done on the go. Though PCs and Desktops still play a major percentage in corporates, mobile devices are being added to the mix in a higher rate. With mobile application usage employees can be more productive, flexible, can have a better customer engagement, enhance branding and marketing and ultimately providing the edge to the companies to be ahead in their game. While the benefits to a mobile ready corporate is multi faceted, creating an enterprise level mobile strategy is equally daunting which needs careful planning, diligent market research and a clear governance model. In one of my previous post I covered some steps on how to build a corporate mobile development strategy, below are some areas which you must need to consider before having a big jump into the mobility race. 1.) Understand your customers – This is the key, no business is successful if you don’t have enough customers to leverage it. Some large corporates only enable their senior leadership team to access the corporate data through mobile devices. Rethink if everyone in the company can be provided access to manage corporate data on the go. The more number of users the more benefit you can reap from a corporate deployment standpoint. 2.) Adopt a BYOD program – Bring Your Own Device programs are increasingly getting popular every year within the corporates. If you enable a larger crowd to access corporate data on the go then think about adopting a BYOD program. Some interesting information related to adopting a BYOD program can be found here. 3.) Don’t reinvent the wheel – If you think there are apps out there in iTune or Google app store which meets your needs then try leveraging them instead of completely developing something from scratch. if there are no security concerns then these apps are best bang for your buck. 4.) Look for alternatives – If iOS or Android development is not your niche, then try developing responsive sites, hybrid apps etc. 5.) Integration capability and flexibility – Most corporate apps get full power only when you integrate those into the backend ERP systems. Please have that in mind which technology you choose because that will have a big impact on your integration effort. Some technology will have easy api integration where some technology will have more complex integration procedures which can be a bottleneck for SMBs and startups. 6.) Consider an impressive aesthetics – even if the user base is low don’t take that as an excuse for a poor UI design. Mobile application usage is all about experience and having a rich experience can take you a long way. Try hiring a UCD (user centric design) person, freelancer etc to design if you don’t have that expertise right now. Appple’s continuous iOS upgrades are known to break the UIs for lots of old apps. An experience designer can develop something which will be future proof for any UI related issues w.r.t apple’s OS upgrades. 7.) Universal app – If you have larger crowd using both smartphones and tablets to access corporate data then it make sense to have an universal app designed instead of different version for smartphone and tablets separately. 8.) Security and other corporate policy consideration – have a holistic view of all of your corporate policy and security management areas. Some corporate still need some sort of VPN to login to access their corporate data. Some have cloud solutions which doesn’t blend well with VPN setup. If you deal with lot of sensitive data then a robust security assessment and deployment might be required. While some BYOD platform provides integrated security feature in their package pre-built into it other cost effective solutions might need custom security feature to be developed to secure your corporate data. 9.) Cost – last but not the least, Cost is the factor which affects your decision the most. Large enterprises have different organizations (like IT, Infrastructure, CRM, ERP, HR etc) within them who have similar needs and they want to have an app but don’t have enough capital to invest. You can start thinking about how to engage all those different stakeholders and get a partial share of the cost from each of those business areas which will enable you to develop the app, positively impacting various business functions where keeping the overall spend from the business areas to the minimum.