10 Ingredients for a Successful Enterprise-Led Mobile Initiative

by Chris Preimesberger

Going mobile starts with the business, not the technology, and it’s essential that line-of-business leaders take the lead in driving this transformation. They must understand the key tasks and activities that must be mobilized and what it takes to expedite them. IT managers can then determine the essential technologies and services to mobilize these activities across the organization.

A tech-savvy workforce expects the same intuitive user experience in their work apps as they find in their personal apps. CIOs need to identify the tasks and activities in which great mobile experiences drive productivity and growth, and then develop apps that will increase effectiveness and reduce costs.

With the proliferation of connected devices, employees are going to use different devices in different ways and transition effortlessly between them, so it’s crucial to engage them with a consistent experience. CIOs need develop apps that deliver an integrated, contextual and optimized experience across a broad range of devices. They need to capitalize on the right development tools as well as on the underlying application-level services to rapidly build and deploy multi-channel experiences.

CIOs need to support their employees’ growing demands for seamless connecting and information access with more mobile apps. Relying on a mobile application development platform makes sense because developers can write an application once and deliver native, hybrid and Web apps for smartphones, tablets and desktops. By leveraging this single code base, the time, effort and costs required to build the second app are substantially lower than the first.

It helps to design for mobile first, then identify the engaging moments that add value to key business activities. Design the apps from the experience in, rather than from the data out.

It’s essential to focus on the overall security of enterprise applications while mobilizing business operations for competitive advantage. CIOs need to pay attention to the user experience for authentication and access controls; desktop security processes may be unnecessarily burdensome for fast-paced mobile access. Consider contextual sources and networked services that can accelerate and access controls with mobile devices.

A digitally savvy workforce expects to access business critical information anywhere, anytime. As enterprises begin to focus on productivity, it’s important that mobile device management encompasses company-specific apps across a number of devices as well as accommodates BYOD strategies.

Mobilizing business activities is an ongoing journey, not just a series of one-time events. Think holistically about mobilizing opportunities. CIOs need to listen to their customers and partners to foster innovation and identify moments of engagement.

Collaboration between designers, developers and business users is key to reducing friction and improving efficiency. Too often, end-user testing and verification is left until too late in the development cycle to make a difference. CIOs should consider investing in collaborative mobile app design and development solutions to enhance the ability to deliver delightful multi-channel solutions.

Mobilizing an enterprise is more than just introducing apps running on various mobile devices. This involves a mind-set change—moving away from large-scale, monolithic applications to ones that are more agile, more nimble and more efficient. Innovative IT, such as mobile, is establishing new ways for an organization to function, for the workforce to collaborate and share information, and for the lines of business to engage with partners and customers.