For many years, IT organisations invested millions of dollars in enterprise systems and databases (like SAP, Oracle, SQL Server and salesforce.com) and created an overwhelming level of enterprise IT complexity as relevant data and functionality is now peppered among a myriad of different silos. Much of this was built from the bottom up — designing and selecting the right “back-end” servers, databases and “front-end” systems.
How about the user? Where did the user fit in all this? Well, users were doomed to change their ways in order to fit the newly implemented systems. They had to go through a painful learning process that would teach them to muddle through several different systems to accomplish their daily tasks.
After a lot of irrational exuberance that led to a lot of chaos involving the development of mobile applications in the enterprise, more rational approaches to building these applications rapidly are finally starting to gain force.
The majority of IT organisations initially approached mobile application development one application at a time. The reason for this has to do with failing to realise how pervasive mobile computing would be across the enterprise, which made these endeavours intrinsically tactical and not strategic.
The fact is that mobile development skills are not abundant in the market, thus enterprises relied on particular vendors to deliver a couple of mobile apps disconnected from the data silos in the organisation, which more often than not fell short of meeting enterprise mobility needs and were not sustainable for the future in terms of ability to change and evolve, as mobility requirements and benefits become clearer.
The end result has led to everything from low developer productivity to outright project failure. A recent study of over 200 IT managers, conducted by “Opinions Matter”, found that nearly half admitted their organisation was struggling to develop mobile applications.
To rectify this issue, enterprise IT organisations are starting to embrace a more platform-centric approach to developing mobile applications in order to make them future-proof and leverage the investments in the long run by maintaining the ability to evolve continuously and adapt to market and user needs.
These platforms typically allow developers to access existing back end services, data silos and applications in a highly consistent manner. In addition to fostering the reuse of code and services across multiple mobile applications, they typically are integrated with a variety of mobile application and device management frameworks that serve to both secure mobile applications and reduce the total cost of managing them.
Early this year, a global CIO round table discussed leveraging mobile, cloud and big data to deliver innovative systems that help companies drive more revenue, increase productivity, and be loved by their users. In enterprise mobility, the user experience is even more important for user adoption — which is paramount. This is something that IT organisations must know when wanting to deliver applications. Platforms that simplify the focus on the functionality, the user and the design are increasingly mandatory.
Ultimately, IT organisations want to be able to work from a single code base for each application to help keep their development efforts to an absolute minimum, while creating great UX and thinking functionally from the user’s perspective. That is where the intelligence is nowadays, not on the technicalities — provided you have the right platform to do so. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that when appropriate, organisations don’t want to be able to take advantage of a particular technical feature on any given mobile computing platform.
As platform approaches to rapidly delivering mobile applications continue to mature, developers no longer have to make compromises. Instead, they can continue to develop mobile applications using a single code base, while preserving the flexibility they need to optimise the attributes of that application when and only they best can see fit.
The entire way mobile applications in the enterprise are delivered is rapidly maturing. As a result, it’s also clear that organisations, which come to understand the importance of a platform-centric approach to delivering those applications, will best realise the true value of a “Mobile First” enterprise.
The writer is the director for Middle East and Africa at OutSystems.
