If your organization is struggling with developing and deploying business mobile apps for your employees, your IT department is probably challenged with a lack of funding needed, enough time, proficient development skills, as well as a backlog of other projects that have already justified their benefits and ROI.
According to Gartner’s “The Key Fundamentals Required to Scale Mobile App Development” report, organizations are developing far fewer apps than projected demand from business users. These organizations are struggling to develop coherent mobility strategies that integrate with their business processes. Not only are these companies dealing with rapid changes in technology, but they are also dealing with rapid changes in culture and employee expectations as consumerization takes a firm hold in the enterprise.
As employees use several consumer apps in their daily lives, they are putting the pressure on the business to develop similar mobile apps for their business needs, leaving IT overwhelmed with choosing the right tools, vendors, and platforms that will allow easy deployment of applications. By taking a bimodal approach to the app development process, you can set your business up for mobile success:
First, Collaborate to Prioritize Your Business Goals and Outcomes
First, your IT and operations teams need to formulate a process of mobile app prioritization that involves the understanding of the needs of business users. Meeting their needs is a key factor in defining common criteria for evaluating mobile app projects. To do this IT must always ask, “What can the business gain if we successfully deploy this app?”
The easiest way to do this is to start with low-hanging fruit or apps that are the easiest to develop but solve small but significant problems. From here, projects should be prioritized by apps that are easy to build but have a low impact, followed by apps that are hard to build and yield a low impact. Prioritizing these apps with a structured plan is the most efficient way for your organization to begin the mobile app development process, before ever investing in an app development platform.
Next, Choose the Right Mobile App Experience For Your Users
Once your IT and operations teams have collaborated to prioritize the business apps needed, it is time to consider the mobile app experience you want your users to have, whether it be native, web, or a hybrid approach. A native app is developed for one type of operating system such as iOS, and then directly installed onto the device itself. If your team chooses to implement native apps, your users will download the app directly to their device from the app store. Web apps are internet-enabled and available on a mobile device’s web browser without being downloaded. Since it runs in a web browser, it does not always promise the best user experience.
Hybrid mobile apps though, are built with a combination of web technologies including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and are hosted inside a native application that utilizes a mobile platform’s WebView. Most hybrid mobile applications, including PowWow’s SmartUX Platform leverage Apache Cordova, a platform that provides a consistent set of JavaScript APIs to access devices capabilities through plug-ins, which are built with native code. When hybrid applications are well-written, it will not look or behave any differently than a native app and will provide the best experience for your users.
Finally, Create Hybrid Apps Using a Rapid Mobile App Development Platform
If your organization has a long list of apps that your business users need, you want to develop them rapidly to meet demand. Innovation is driving this market and replacing traditional coding approaches such as native or web development tools with more effective RMAD tools. The best RMAD platforms have a GUI drag-and-drop visual editor, the ability to customize on the back-end with JavaScript language, and can integrate seamlessly with existing legacy systems including Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Infor.
With the ability to develop apps with little to no coding required, IT and business users, or your citizen developers with limited programming skills, can collaborate to create fully-functional mobile apps. Using an RMAD platform in your organization allows non-technical users from each department that are already aligned with specific business goals, to take part in the app development process.
PowWow Mobile’s SmartUX Platform is the only RMAD platform on the market that can successfully modernize and mobilize your existing legacy applications or create net-new mobile first apps that by connecting to any third-party data source, API or SQL. With SmartUX, your IT and operations teams can work together to leverage your existing investments and create rich app experiences that dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of traditional mobile app development.
To learn more about how we can help your organization simplify the app development processes, click here to read, “3 Ways PowWow Mobile Helps You Accelerate Mobile App Development” blog post.
