Today’s Lines of Business (LOB) professionals rely on numerous applications to conduct their day-to-day work including payment processing and enterprise resource planning (ERP) apps to business intelligence (BI), customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise messaging systems (EMS). In fact, the average enterprise has 3,000 – 7,000 active applications and approximately one app for every 10-20 employees.
Across industries, the job functions of employees are becoming increasingly mobile. Job functions such as billing, logistics, and inventory, which used to require back office processes and workflows lasting days or weeks, can now be completed in minutes or hours, on almost any tablet or smartphone.
The global workforce is becoming so mobile oriented that according to a 2015 Citrix report, 61 percent of workers report working outside the office at least part of the time, using more than three devices. So it might be surprising to learn that in most large businesses, only a handful of critical applications are truly mobilized.
The Mystery of the Mobile Enterprise
From business to personal, mobility is now a part of our everyday lives, and business users everywhere expect and want to use their mobile devices to enhance their personal and professional productivity.
In fact, Gartner predicts by 2020, lightweight web and mobile-style app integration will have completely displaced traditional approaches:
Traditional Approaches to Mobile App Development That Just Don’t Work
Vendor-Supplied Mobile Apps
With thousands of applications per enterprise, there’s simply not enough time or resources to mobile-enable all existing processes. Today, some enterprise vendors offer mobile versions of their applications, but they vary in quality and completeness and only address a handful of business challenges.
Building Native Mobile Apps
Developing mobile versions of applications is a costly and time-consuming endeavor, costing around $280,000 per app per year. Given those expenses and time, LOB must be selective about how and where they choose to spend their resources. The challenge here is that different users want or need different components and functionality, which means customization. Realistically, most enterprises have few applications that truly merit the investment of time and money for custom coding.
Counterproductive and Unusable Virtualization Processes
Enterprises that want the fastest path to mobility often turn to virtualization or mobile browser strategies, essentially force-fitting a desktop-based application onto a mobile device. The problem with this approach is that the resulting applications aren’t very usable because they are not optimized for smaller screens and native controls of mobile devices. Since they fall short of business users’ expectations, people tend not to use them.
The Transformative Approach to App Development
PowWow Mobile is helping customers rapidly ‘transform’ their business-critical applications into fully functioning, native mobile apps, without writing a single line of code. Unlike other solutions that take a development-centric approach, PowWow Mobile preserves and leverages customers’ existing software investments by ‘transforming’ their existing applications.
With PowWow Mobile, LOB can work with IT to mobilize even the most sophisticated and demanding apps in days, providing a mobile experience that works on any device. And because the transformed application looks and behaves just like other mobile apps your users are comfortable with, user adoption is high.
To learn more about how lines of business and IT leaders can work together in the quest for apps to enhance productivity, click here to read, “Opportunity Lost: The True Cost of Not Providing Business Mobile Apps” white paper.
