Having an enterprise mobile strategy – once optional – is now business critical. Companies are building mobile applications with three main objectives:
Enable employee productivity
When employees can access important sales, customers, products, or operations data via mobile business applications, they spend more time working and making decisions on the go, and less time catching up in the office.
Improve customer experience
Mobile customer applications increase brand preference by enabling customers to shop, compare, buy, and access services at any time.
Increase partner collaboration
Mobile applications offer instantaneous communication, making it easy for all stakeholders in the supply chain to stay looped into exactly how, where and when to turn their cog in the machine.
If a company needs to manage workflows across multiple applications, simply buying applications that support mobile will not be enough. Mobile IT strategies have to support different business groups, each asking for multiple applications. As each group changes strategies and systems, IT must also be able to update mobile applications, quickly and seamlessly. A line-of-business can't wait six months to a year for an application to be developed or updated if it is to remain competitive. Enterprises need to run fast on their first mobile initiative, and just as fast on the next hundred.
Success for a mobile IT strategy is very tightly tied to the speed at which mobile applications can be created and most importantly, updated. Companies find that their mobile apps become digital channels and quickly want to invest more in improving the capabilities they offer through mobile. Speedy mobile deployments come from fast front-end development and fast back-end access.
On the front-end, mobile developers and architects are focused on deploying functional mobile applications with easy-to-use interfaces for immersive and responsive experiences – as quickly as possible.
However, speed on the front end is the easy bit compared to what it costs to power the application. Front-end speed doesn't matter if an application's intended content is locked away in systems across the enterprise. Custom code and point-to-point integration not only slow application development, they cripple the ability to make changes to applications.
Exposing an enterprise's assets is risky business, and the greater the number of applications, users, and systems, the greater the risk of assets being compromised. Moreover, systems that aren't built to handle the volume of data requests that might be expected from mobile applications are prone to failure or downtime, which ultimately results in a bad user experience.
This creates a conflict between the mobile application developer's need to access data quickly, and the back-end developer's need to ensure access to enterprise data is well secured, governed, and managed.
The solution is API-led connectivity. In order to support front-end speed while having robust back-end governance, enterprises need to provide mobile developers with self- service access to data across the organisation.
An early success came from the development of a mobile application to automate and digitise wholesale ordering and streamline operations with partners. The company was able to track external assets in the field, enabling them to know inventory stock situations and begin to address them on a timely basis. The next step for the company is to extend its mobile strategy to consumer facing applications. Full visibility and governance of all integrations makes it possible to do so quickly.
The API-led approach provides a layered model that unlocks back-end system data while providing security and control over the data being used. It enables developers to to build great mobile applications without having to understand back-end systems.
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