Mobile nowadays has become more front
and center in the enterprise landscape. It's both directly and
indirectly creating new revenue or yielding the existing revenue
streams. Companies that listen and respond properly to mobile trends
can win competitive advantages. Is your organization mobile ready?
Here are five key questions to ask as
you prepare for your company to go mobile.
1. Is your business model mobile
ready?
It's apparent that mobile is now
everywhere and significantly changing the way businesses operate. It
is considered to postdate the days of personal computers and is
becoming the main tool of the business workforce. All stakeholders
who are influencing your business, including customers, business
partners and employees, are also profoundly being influenced by
mobile technologies. They are going mobile. New workflows and
connection patterns are being created among your business
influencers. Customer demands are getting more sophisticated with all
the mobile options, which may force your company to reexamine a lot
of things, including its business model, to reposition where it is in
the value chain. Revenue streams are shifting to where the mobile
involvement is, and you have to refine your business model
accordingly to keep your customer happy as well as catch new
opportunities. Mobile
is where the customers are, so that's where you need to be.
2. Is your infrastructure mobile
ready?
A
research study from IBM states that 91 percent of mobile users
always put their mobile devices within a reachable distance. It
implies that users want the ability to access applications and
services everywhere, whenever they are needed and of course as
quickly as possible. This challenges your infrastructure in terms of
availability, performance and responsiveness to the explosive number
of requests.
The wide adoption of mobile devices
also challenges your current systems
architecture. Technically, services that have been exposed outside of
the enterprise might not be suitable for mobile requests because in
responding to the requests from a mobile environment, which is
typically limited in computing resources, the data being transferred
back should be lightweight enough that it can be effectively consumed
by mobile applications to provide the expected user experience.
Additionally, the diversity of mobile
platforms
with the involvement of the platform owners in operating some useful
services (for example, C2DM
or APNS,
the users' service providers and so forth) would need your
enterprise system to be adapted
to interact with those external systems effectively and securely.
3. Have you considered security?
Security has always been a big concern
when enabling an enterprise to go mobile. Controlling security for
mobile is getting more and more challenging due to the natural
portability of the mobile environment as well as the constantly
growing diversity of mobile platforms and mobile applications being
produced. It consequently requires an efficient approach from the
strategic level with clearly defined mobile use cases in the business
context. This in turn helps the enterprise to build up a
comprehensive mobile security policy to more detailed levels, like
how to use technologies for implementing the policy and how to make
mobile users aware of security threats and regularly educate them to
follow security practices to protect themselves and the corporation.
That circle from strategy to policy to technology
and education should incrementally, iteratively evolve to keep
your security strategy up to date and ensure that it reflects your
business needs.
4. Is your design approach and
concept mobile
adequate?
Mobile devices are typically made with
smaller screens and are several times less powerful than desktop
computers in terms of computing resources, yet the activities
performed on mobile require a sense of immediacy. They tend to be
tactical in nature. As a result, the interaction flow between the
user and the mobile application requires a completely new user
experience design mindset. Data presented on mobile needs to be
somehow contextualized and condensed to convey as much information as
possible and to best utilize less network bandwidth and hardware
resources. There is no room for redundancy. Information and an
application's features need to be progressively, selectively
displayed.
Design approaches applied for desktop
are consequently inadequate for the mobile environment, not only from
the user interface perspective but also from code design since the
same code would not run on mobile as effectively as on desktop. It
needs to be leaner.
Mobile is becoming mainstream in the
workforce, and a mobile application is no longer simply a smaller,
zoomed-in version of your desktop application. Applying an
appropriate design mindset will make your mobile application, the
heart of your mobile business model, more attractive to help you meet
user expectations and gain a competitive advantage.
5. Is your application
development process mobile suitable?
Mobile devices and platforms evolve
rapidly, and your app consequently needs to adapt quickly to those
changes in order to continuously gain user satisfaction. In other
word, mobile apps are written, used and replaced at a much higher
rate than traditional enterprise apps. That requires your development
process to be refined so that your app will be iteratively delivered
more quickly without sacrificing quality.
Additionally, mobile user expectations
are very high, yet loyalty is low. They will easily forget your app
if they cannot find what they need on the very first try on their
tiny mobile devices. In order to continuously make sure your app
satisfies its users and keeps them using the apps, you need to get
them involved in the development of the apps earlier, interact with
them more frequently to get feedback and then meet their expectations
promptly—period.
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