5 Myths of Enterprise Mobility in a Mobile First world

Despite having a clear understanding of the benefits of mobile-first, the majority of the organizations still have an ad-hoc approach to app development and are only beginning to consider platform selection to help them to formalize their mobile strategy. Most of the companies start looking at Mobility as a mere "problem solver" rather than creating a complete blue-print of the mobility strategy and the core benefits that the organization aims to achieve.

You may want to create a "mobile center of excellence," but its charter shouldn't be to own everything mobile.  That model simply won't scale. Instead, a mobile center of excellence should serve as an enabler, used to:

·         provide standards and guidance

·         facilitate knowledge sharing

·         offer common means to easily access corporate data

·         supply reusable mobile services (e.g. notifications, storage, offline sync)

·         set a common analytics/measurement approach for mobile initiatives

·         establish outsourcing options for extra capacity

·         ensure security

Here are some of the persistent myths surrounding the building of enterprise mobile apps for today's mobile-first cloud-first world:

1.     Enterprise apps take lot of time to develop and deploy

Industry received wisdom dictates that apps, especially those designed for enterprise, can take at least half a year to build and launch. With some organizations requiring anywhere from 10-100 apps to serve different business units, the time required to build apps can appear prohibitive.

2.     It's too complicated for apps to access legacy systems 


Enterprise organizations that have already made large investments in legacy systems such as ERP and are hesitant to develop mobile apps that cannot seamlessly plug into these existing mission-critical technologies. Enterprises must look at a platform that has capability to integrate into diverse ERPs or legacy systems with an API infrastructure that allows integrating legacy systems easily. 

3.     Mobile app developers must keep up with a myriad of coding languages and frameworks – it's impossible

Learning new development languages in order to build individual apps for each device platform can be tedious, and for some enterprises entails constantly hiring fresh developers with different skill sets. When creating hybrid cross-platform apps, developers often employ as many as 10 different coding languages for enterprise app development projects. To simplify development, developers can use mobile app platforms using a 'bring your own toolkit' approach that allows them to use the languages and toolkits they are most comfortable with. Choose a platform that allows developers to use both native as well as hybrid development environments.

4.     Enterprise apps are always data-heavy, placing high loads on handsets and backend systems.

The best mobile app platforms take large amounts of data from the backend and transmit a small filtered set of data to the handset: reducing overall demands.

5.     Companies need a Chief Mobility Officer to successfully handle company-wide app development

This myth assumes that one central figure will successfully oversee app development and deployment across the enterprise. By collaborating and using the same technology standards and requirements, a Mobile Centre of Excellence or Mobile Steering Committee can guide mobile projects across multiple business units without creating new silos. This has elevated mobility to a strategic level. Companies should look more to cloud based and agile mobile application strategies to support their growing mobile workforces, without which enterprise productivity and profitability improvements will suffer.