Mobile Strategy and Development

Transcription

1 White Paper Mobility in 2014: An Essential Guide for CIOs The Ten New Rules of Mobile Strategy and Success Author Geoffrey Bock Principal, Bock & Company

2 Table of contents 1. Recognize mobility as primarily a business problem Build an experience-driven enterprise Expect a multi-channel world Make mobile apps an integral part of your enterprise applications portfolio Design for mobile first Secure key information assets and business processes while delivering mobile experiences Manage the complete mobile enterprise experience Invest in a successive stream of mobile apps Emphasize collaborative app design for mobilizing experiences Embrace mobility through organizational agility TOC

3 Executive summary A comprehensive mobile strategy is imperative to today s business success. But what does it take to get there, and how can CIOs ensure they not only keep up, but take the lead? Read on to discover ten must-dos for an innovative, impactful approach to mobile. 1. Recognize mobility as primarily a business problem. Going mobile starts with the business, not the technology. The mobile revolution transforms how your customers, partners, and employees experience your enterprise. It s essential to recognize that business leaders should drive this transformation. They are the ones who best understand the key tasks and activities that must be mobilized, as well as what it takes to expedite them. They have the insights and can assemble the metrics to identify the business results. At the same time, technology leaders have an essential role to play influencing the strategy. After all, they are the ones responsible for maintaining enterprise applications and architectures, and know how things work. A successful mobile strategy brings business and technology leaders together in the same room literally and metaphorically and ensures that they are aligned around a common set of goals. Business leaders should describe how things can be done faster, better, and/or cheaper using mobile devices. For their part, technology leaders can then determine the essential technologies and services required to mobilize these activities across the organization. 2. Build an experience-driven enterprise. Mobilize the business processes that create competitive advantage. Mobile apps are the tip of the iceberg for building an experience-driven enterprise. With the rapid adoption of mobile devices, your digitally savvy workers are expecting the same delightful experiences in the workplace as they find with consumer-oriented Page 1

4 apps. You want to empower them with the information they need to do their jobs anywhere, any time, and on any device. Yet you ve already invested a lot of effort and money building out your enterprise infrastructure to support your core business activities. Your IT group is going to need innovative tools, technologies, and ideas to mobilize these resources while continuing to manage them securely. Identify the tasks and activities where great mobile experiences drive productivity and growth. Develop the mobile apps that increase the effectiveness, reduce the costs, and mitigate the risks of your essential business operations. As you launch these apps, invest even more in the underlying IT infrastructure and cloud-based services that deliver the agility and security to power truly innovative experiences. Your mobile strategy is a leading indicator for your firm s transformation into an experience-driven enterprise. 3. Expect a multi-channel world. Plan to deploy apps that run across all channels while connecting to a disparate array of back-end enterprise applications and cloud-based services. As the revolution in mobile devices accelerates, recognize that your customers, partners, and employees are going to rely on multiple endpoints throughout their workdays. They are going to use different devices in different ways, and transition effortlessly from one environment to another. You need to engage them with picture-perfect, consistent experiences. In this multi-channel world, it s no longer sufficient to develop standalone apps for just one or two endpoints. Expect to develop apps that deliver an integrated, contextual, and optimized experience across a broad range of devices, while simultaneously connecting to a diverse array of back-end enterprise systems. Focus on mobilizing key customer-facing processes. Mobile app development extends across a multi-channel spectrum. Streamline your development efforts by focusing not on the specific devices and the skills of separate teams, but rather on the value-adding activities that end users need to do. Wherever possible, avoid redundant development efforts and unnecessary costs. Be prepared to capitalize on the right development tools as well as on the underlying application-level services for rapidly building and deploying multi-channel experiences. Page 2

5 4. Make mobile apps an integral part of your enterprise applications portfolio. Be prepared to support your users growing demands for seamless connectivity and information access. From a business perspective, it s essential to deploy and maintain mobile apps that delight your customers and workers while optimizing your upfront investments and operating costs. Plan to develop a portfolio of multi-channel apps that utilize a range of available technologies to exploit the capabilities of device-specific features to their fullest. Tune this portfolio to the structure of your enterprise architecture. Here s where relying on a mobile application development platform (MADP) makes sense. Your developers can write an application once and immediately deliver native, hybrid, and web apps for smartphones, tablets, and desktops. By leveraging this single code base, the business benefits expand exponentially with component reuse. The time, effort, and costs required to build the second app are substantially lower than the first, and the resources required for the third are even less than the second. Moreover, with the flexibility of either an on premise or cloudbased deployment, your organization can keep pace with constantly changing mobile technologies. You can deliver a superior experience with a very affordable total cost of ownership (TCO) and an accelerated time-to-market. 5. Design for mobile first. Build applications from the experience in, not the data out. There s a new playbook for producing the multi-channel apps that deliver business value. The script begins by identifying how these apps (many of which are mobile) support high-value tasks. A great desktop experience is often unsuitable for a mobile app and needs to be restructured, taking into account not only a smaller screen display but also the new ways of working. An app running on a smartphone may focus on information snacking a quick take and context-sensitive lists while the same app on a tablet may accommodate a richly designed environment with interactive browsing. Page 3

6 Practically, it helps to design for mobile first, and identify the engaging moments that add value to key business activities. Many of these moments are data-driven and adaptive. They are going to change depending on the business context. Design the apps from the experiences in, rather than from the data out. To deliver exceptional experiences across multiple channels, be prepared to break through the information stovepipes of existing enterprise applications, assemble content from disparate sources, and adapt the results to multiple business contexts. 6. Secure key information assets and business processes while delivering mobile experiences. Develop the policies and protocols for managing mobile apps that address security concerns. Of course, there are inherent risks when empowering mobile workers in the enterprise. You have undoubtedly invested substantial time and resources developing your overall application environment, including your organization s enterprise-wide security, governance, and information access capabilities. Security remains a central concern when rolling out mobile enterprise apps and making the transition to the multi-channel enterprise. It s important to mobilize operations without compromising core business activities. Continue to secure both information in motion and information at rest. With the added concerns about mobility, be sure to consider content transitioning across mobile networks as well as what is stored locally on mobile devices. When managing the mobile apps that access enterprise applications, pay attention to the user experiences for authentication and access controls. What is required for securing desktop apps may be unnecessarily burdensome for fast-paced mobile access. Consider contextual sources and networked services that can accelerate authentication and access controls with mobile devices. Make mobility an aspect of your enterprise-wide governance initiatives. Invest in the capabilities to provision mobile enterprise apps without adding to the workloads of your IT staff. It s essential to focus on the overall security for enterprise applications while mobilizing for competitive advantage. Page 4

7 7. Manage the complete mobile enterprise experience. Expand MDM to encompass company-specific apps and content on an ever-growing set of devices. Gone are the days when mobilizing your workforce simply entailed corporateprovisioned mobile devices (most often Blackberries) connected to enterprise accounts. Today your digitally empowered employees expect to access business-critical information anywhere and at any time. As you focus on boosting their productivity, you are going to need to manage your mobile enterprise apps across any number of smartphones, tablets, and other nifty devices, as well as accommodate BYOD strategies. It s essential to focus on the complete mobile experiences that your enterprise delivers to employees and partners. Expect to separate the management of mobile enterprise apps from the devices themselves, as well as from the other apps workers have on their smartphones and tablets. Pay attention to securing and managing the enterprise content on these devices as well. In fact, sophisticated enterprise mobility management (EMM) can structure and control enterprise-specific content, apps, and device capabilities, oriented around your mobile governance policies and processes. Use this approach to provision, update, and secure the portfolio of mobile enterprise apps you provide to your workforce. Rely on EMM to manage and secure all of your business-related information your employees and partners have on their devices. 8. Invest in a successive stream of mobile apps. Plan for the continuing evolution of mobile apps over the long haul, and invest accordingly. Like the introduction of personal computers over thirty years ago, mobilizing your business activities is an ongoing journey and not just a series of one-time events. Be prepared to capitalize on your pioneering initiatives. Build awareness and expertise about the power of mobility among your workforce by investing for the long haul. You can foster innovation by listening to your customers and partners, and then identifying where you can mobilize the moments of engagement. Page 5

8 Once you ve successfully launched your first few mobile apps, assess their impact and how you ve developed them. Take stock of the costs, time, and resources required. Evaluate the capabilities of your enterprise architecture and the inherent flexibility of available services for delivering great mobile experiences. Be sure to consider how you can leverage cloud-based development tools to accelerate the delivery of multi-channel apps. Think holistically about mobilizing opportunities and how a platform approach to application development accelerates achieving your strategic business objectives. 9. Emphasize collaborative app design for mobilizing experiences. Streamline the connections among designers, developers, and business users to reduce friction and improve efficiency. Your business users intuitively know great mobile experiences when they have them. Developing and delivering these experiences in a timely and economical way is a different matter. It s incumbent on your app designers to design the engaging experiences and ensure that developers understand what they need to build. Be sure to refine the design processes and mobile app development expertise within your organization. Too often, end user testing and verification is left until too late in the development cycle to make a difference. It helps to figure out ways to engage representative business users in iterative design and evaluation activities while development is underway, and before the app is delivered. Great mobile experiences need not cost a bundle nor take an unnecessarily long time to produce. Exploit cloud-based services for coordinating the activities of designers and developers. Consider investing in collaborative mobile app design and development solutions to enhance your ability to deliver delightful multi-channel solutions. Page 6

9 10. Embrace mobility through organizational agility. Expect to rapidly roll out a continuing stream of mobile apps and experiences. There s more to mobilizing your enterprise that just introducing touch-sensitive apps running on various devices. From an IT perspective, there s also a mind-set change, moving away from large-scale, monolithic applications to ones that are more agile, more nimble, and more efficient. While the time and resources required to develop an individual app is going to shrink, you ll want to launch many more apps that foster engaging experiences and target particular tasks. Innovative technologies are going to power organizational changes. Not only are you introducing new tools, applications, and security concerns into your enterprise architecture. You are also establishing new ways for your organization to function, for your workforce to collaborate and share information, and for your lines of business to engage with partners and customers. Consider introducing a mobile center of excellence to enhance and mobilize the application development activities across your organization. This is a good way to build awareness and introduce expertise to meet these new IT challenges. You can identify the best practices and the optimal solutions related to mobile app design, development, security, and governance that work best for your organization. You can track costs and benefits in a systematic manner, and also develop strategies to optimize investments. As you introduce innovative applications and solutions, you can bring business insights and organizational leadership to the entire challenge of multi-channel mobility. Page 7

10 About Kony, Inc. Kony is the fastest growing cloud-based mobile application development platform (MADP) in the industry with over 600 live multi-channel apps, serving over 20 million end users across 45 countries, and generating over 1 billion sessions. The Kony Experience Platform is an integrated software development lifecycle (SDLC) platform to define, design, develop, test, deploy, and manage multi-channel applications from a single code base. With Kony, you can deliver stunning user-first experiences, get to market faster, and lower your application TCO. Kony also offers a suite of more than 33 ready-to-run B2E and B2C apps that enable customers to quickly extend their business. For more information, please visit and connect with Kony on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn Kony Solutions, Inc. All rights reserved.