We may live in a mobile and digital world, but a significant number of organizations have still not made the jump to mobility in the workplace. For those that have, many are still facing a significant gap between device security and control and enabling employees mobile access to critical data and workflows. Organizations are missing a real opportunity to capitalize on all the benefits that productivity-enhancing mobile business apps can provide.
However, traditional mobile app development solutions that IT often rely on are not up to the task of working at the speed of mobile. In fact, only 15 – 20 percent of desired apps are ever created due to the high cost and extended implementation time of traditional mobile app development processes.
To quickly and efficiently deploy business apps to users, organizations must embrace rapid mobile app development (RMAD) solutions along with expedited deployments and strategies that focus on quickly getting apps to users and leveraging the inherent abilities of their devices. When this methodology is followed, your teams can achieve maximum efficiency.
Deploy Fast, Iterate Often
To provide a positive user experience, start by leveraging the inherent characteristics of the mobile devices that your employees use such as the camera, GPS, and voice-to-text capabilities. Any delay in getting these apps to your users will ultimately create a negative cost for your organization based on the loss of productivity gains that would have occurred during the length of time the app was not available. In an internal business setting, it’s more important that functional programs be available to users quickly and be easily modifiable, especially since many will change regularly as business needs change/evolve. Usability is important, as is functionality and leveraging pre-built templates for common workflows and tasks will expedite deployment as well as ensure brand standards are met. With templates, organizations can deploy apps at a rapid pace and iterate often if users needed are not met.
Enable Lines of Business to Work Alongside IT
The old way of thinking is that an organization’s IT department is solely responsible for the development and deployment of all technology, including mobile apps. This way of thinking often leads to delays in deployments, a lack of budget and resources, and burn out from IT.
Rapid mobile app development platforms modernize that old-school way of thinking by giving power to Lines of Business workers to create apps alongside IT. Since most RMAD solutions are low-or-no-code based, business analysts have the power to help develop apps using drag-and-drop visual editors. With the assistance of business analysts to create essential corporate apps, organizations can expect to deploy three to five times as many mobile apps to their users.
How Much Are You Losing By Delaying App Deployment?
Bottom line: app delays are costly for your organization. To assess what the ability to rapidly deploy mobile apps to users offers, we can evaluate both the development cost savings and the lost opportunity cost. By relying on traditional app development solutions, organizations can expect an average investment of $250K – $350K per app. Further, the average enterprise app can take six months or more to materialize after it’s specified.
In a rapid application deployment scenario, the average mobile app can be created in three to six weeks at a cost of approximately $50K-$75K. This can result in a savings of $200K-$300K per app. This is a significant saving and grows quickly as multiple apps are created and deployed.
