By the end of next year, market demand for mobile app development services is expected to grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to supply them, as stated by Gartner, Inc. But where is this demand coming from?
Enterprise mobility is not a trend – it is the new normal. Employees want to take advantage of their time on the go, without having to rush back to the office to get simple tasks done. Therefore, mobile devices must be taken seriously as a modern organizational resource.
However, crafting a truly effective enterprise mobile application is no easy task. So today, we’re sharing with you four steps to building mobile solutions guaranteed to improve your company’s operations.
Step 1: Define Your Purpose:
An Appcelerator survey found that one of the most prominent obstacles in enterprise mobile app development is a lack of clear direction or strategy. If you don’t have a strong vision from the get go, the development process will be enormously time-consuming, your resources will be inefficiently allocated, and the final product isn’t likely to do your business any favours.
Creating a successful application starts with a thorough, targeted plan detailing what company problem the app will solve. In today’s market, a common goal for mobile applications is to improve employee productivity and facilitate the communication of data and ideas.
While this is all well and good, we recommend having a more precise objective in mind. How do you plan to improve productivity? What types of data and ideas need to be facilitated, and in what context? These are the questions that enable you to cater to the strengths of enterprise mobility management and design an app worth making.
For example, The Boston Globe discovered the need for a more efficient way to match the right newspaper advertising inserts to the right papers. To this end, they are developing an enterprise mobile application that will sort through and organize the inserts so that production workers don’t have to waste time hunting through them.
As you can see, your app can have a wide array of meaningful capabilities. At BluEnt, we have created mobile app solutions that range from facilitating corporate emails to complex enterprise-level mobile applications automating supply chain management, streamlining HR management workflows, tracking behaviour for business analytics, and expanding B&C marketing capabilities through social media app development.
Step 2: Define Your Needs:
Once you’ve mapped out the app’s purpose, you need to get into the specifics of what it needs to be capable of. Here are a couple concerns to address before getting started with your developer.
What other platforms could you harness?
Mobile isn’t the only platform employees use on the go. BluEnt takes pride in our expertise in responsive UI & UX, which extends to enterprise mobile application platform development as well as web design. Giving your workers the option of where to access their resources is proven to increase overall employee productivity. What kind of control and accessibility do you need? If you plan to make the application available for the entire organization, it’s worth thinking about controlling varying levels of access for different units. Furthermore, plan out how to obtain and remove permission for employees joining and leaving the company if the app is available on BYOD devices to keep the resource exclusive.
Step 3: Determine How to Build:
Unless you have the necessary skills and resources to develop the application in-house, we suggest outsourcing to a mobile app development company. The complex choices involved in creating effective mobile tactics are not quick to master, and it’s not worth the risk to go into the process without the utmost confidence in your development team.
However, it is important to choose your developers wisely. Organizations are facing increasing pressure to introduce mobile apps simply to keep up with the competition rather than create innovative change in their operations. As a result, the demand for app development has exceeded current capacity, making a great application hard to come by. The only way to combat this phenomenon is by working with a reputable, experienced mobile application development company that understands how to approach the project strategically. BluEnt has consulted a broad range of businesses, developed apps for Android, iPhone and other platforms, and crafted solutions for all organizational departments’ needs. Without this experience to draw from, we would not be able to offer the superior quality of service to our clients today.
One thing to be aware of when outsourcing enterprise mobile apps is how technology changes as your company continues to use this app in the future. BluEnt takes care to ensure that our mobile solutions will adapt to updates and new features efficiently as the needs of your business evolve, saving you time and expenses down the road.
Step 4: Ask for User Feedback:
The app development process does not end once the application is launched. Not only does asking for employee feedback help you improve the application they are using, it can also give you ideas for future mobile solutions addressing new organizational inefficiencies. After all, who would have a more useful opinion than the people actually putting the application into practice?
SAP took this philosophy to heart and created a space for their employees to provide suggestions. According to Senthil Krishnapillai, VP of Development for SAP’s Mobile Secure Group, “Many of the ideas for new apps come from SAP employees who share their business needs in SAP’s Idea Place portal Development, where they can express their ideas.” By sharing and encouraging the discussion of the enterprise mobile app development with its employees, SAP has a consistent stream of reliable information for upcoming mobile solutions.
By following these four steps, you’re sure to create a mobile application worth its weight in gold. The question is whether you’ll use them.
ResearchMoz forecasted that the enterprise mobile app development services market growing by 13.4% annually leading up to 2019. Will you be a part of it? Fill out a form today to get started.
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