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Enterprise Mobile Enablement Guide

Mobile Enablement

White Paper
An Enterprise Guide to Mobile Enablement
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Position your team for maximum success in mobile

Mobility Is Here and Now

Consider this:

  • By 2020, there will be more than 50 billion connected devices across planet earth enabling our ‘smarter’ existence.
    (Source: Gartner)
  • 70% of mobile professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018
    (Source: Gartner)
  • The number of devices managed in the enterprise increased 72% from 2014 to 2015
    (Source: Citrix Mobile Analytics Report, Feb 2015)
  • At work, 18% of employees use 3 devices and 22% use 2 – with more than 56% using 3 or more.
    (Source: Forrester)
  • 65% consumers download business-specific apps for more convenient access to information
    (Source: Salesforce – 2014 Mobile Behavior Report)

Factoring in the proliferation over the next decade, the mobile ecosystem is under constant evolution. The needs of an enterprise can range from an overall mobility strategy, mobile development, mobile application management (MAM), mobile device management (MDM), mobile quality, mobile optimization all the way to incorporating mobile backend-as-a-service (MBaaS) to their enterprise. The first step is to identify your organization’s goals and needs, and then consider your solution alternatives. To better understand your enterprise’s potential mobility needs, read on!

Beyond Mobilization: Managing Your Mobile Brand

No matter where enterprises are on the mobility spectrum, most of them are not fully equipped to drive and support their mobility efforts in house. There are too many moving parts to the equation and there is no one size that fits all. The lack of mobile standardization, security concerns related to data on mobile devices, a shortage of development and testing skills, and the need for complete support with device and OS upgrades – all make determining and staying on the right path very difficult.

The Need for a Quantum Leap

Enterprises need to approach mobility just as strategically as any other key technology service and develop specific goals, milestones and plans accordingly. In addition, they also need to understand the unique requirements of mobile:

  • An open, modular platform architecture with a scalable infrastructure that accommodates projects as they grow from small to large
  • Repeatable pre-built components that can be used across different apps and workflows for development
  • Adaptive workflows that can support a wide range of front-end developer tools and any type of mobile application – native, hybrid or mobile web
  • Standard backend data integrations with major software and backend data systems and a testing strategy that can cover all permutations and types of tests on a select set of devices
  • Easy to understand usage analytics and store stats that can be used to optimize conversion rates
  • The ability to continually add new features to the app based on reviews and evolving needs
  • A keen understanding of existing customer needs through regular surveys that can be incorporated into product roadmap planning.

Managing Your Mobile Application Lifecycle

Enterprises need to approach mobility just as strategically as any other key technology service and develop specific goals, milestones and plans accordingly. In addition, they also need to understand the unique requirements of mobile:
Identifying and confirming your business needs
Creating a requirements roadmap to target specific mobile platforms
Identifying the development environment and synchronization details with backend data
Ensuring appropriate levels of security by authenticating users apps and data
Selecting channels of provisioning and distribution as well as decommissioning
Managing compliance, versioning, monitoring and analytics

At InfoStretch, we have developed our own, proven maturity model to help enterprises determine where they are on the mobility curve and how this impacts their approach. Whether your enterprise is relatively new to mobility or on the cutting edge compared to your competition, we can ensure your mobile strategy gets you where you need to go. With our extensive experience across different industries and use cases, proven best practices, and robust services and tools, we cover the entire spectrum of your mobile lifecycle – starting from requirements gathering, design and development to rigorous testing, monitoring, maintenance and optimization.

Your mobile brand is becoming increasingly strategic to your business and it needs to be high quality, fully secure and provide a top-notch user experience. The underlying architecture needs to scale quickly for faster time to market and support an omni-channel customer and employee experience. It needs to be able to go global with local language translations and compliance measures. It needs to evolve and mature just like any other enterprise brand.

Decoding the Mobile Ecosystem

Mobility is complex. Identifying the end goal of an application and structuring a plan to accomplish requires that we understand the space in which it must operate. Whether you are working on an end-user centric application to improve engagement or an internal application to improve employee productivity, there is a long checklist of items that need to be ticked-off to ensure success. Let’s start with the basics:

Mobile Application Management

In any enterprise and one any device, there are multiple applications to manage. This begins with analyzing the usage of applications – revenue, trend and logs. It also includes managing applications for quality, performance and security, deployment of applications in the app store, provisioning and updates.

Mobile Information Management

This is a specialized discipline because of the large amount of sensitive data that needs to be managed between the mobile device and the corporate servers. This data needs to be decrypted and encrypted based on the various roles and responsibilities.

Mobile Content Management

There is a great deal of mobile content that needs to be distributed and shared across devices – that’s where CMS comes into play. From mobile commerce and rich internet content to social media video and audio streaming, all information needs to be parsed before dissemination.

Mobile Infrastructure Management

Take infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and extend it to mobile. The mobile client, server and backend all need to be managed. This includes all storage, network, servers, virtual layers and OS for the application.

Mobile Application Lifecycle Management

Every application has a lifecycle. It starts with design, requirement building and prototyping, then goes through development, testing and optimization post-launch.

Mobile Device Management (MDM)

BYOD is big. Survey data shows that many enterprises are now providing workers with devices and covering the costs related to them. In addition, more than half of the workforce brings their own devices to work. All these devices need to be managed and monitored in compliance with legacy IT regulations.

Typical MDM activities include: enrolling devices; instantly setting up common configurations such as Exchange, WiFi and VPN; tracking inventory and device types; provisioning and enforcing security policies and managing all devices across a single interface.

Managing Your Mobile Application Lifecycle

For the purposes of this paper, let’s do a quick deep dive into a mobile application’s lifecycle and the need for specialized services. Whether your app is end-user centric (B2C) or internal (B2E), it has to go through the application lifecycle. And at every stage of the cycle, there are unique and critical decisions that need to be made. Some of these include:
  • Outlining requirements and methodologies for design and development
  • Evaluating the various mobile frameworks and platforms to create a clear development strategy for select platforms with specific types of applications
  • Assessing different types of testing required to launch, determining the testing methodology and deciding the mix of automated vs. manual testing required for optimization and app store deployment
  • Understanding the minimum viable support required for the application post-launch
  • Provisioning the app and related updates in the app store and setting up rigorous processes for validation and verification
mobile-app-lifecycle

Tailoring a Mobile Enablement Solution for Your Enterprise

An enterprise mobility solution should be customized for your enterprise and your applications. Start by asking some questions about your current and desired mobile state.
Do you have a mobility roadmap in place?
Is mobility already a priority for you?
What kind of a mobile application are you looking to enable?
What are your end goals from enabling that application?
Have you already crossed the ‘mobile first’ chasm and do you have an established monetization or productivity strategy for your enterprise application?
In assessing your enterprise road to mobile, consider the roadmap, priority level, the type of mobile application required and the end goals of the endeavor. The scale below provides a general guide to see where you are and assess where you want to go.
1
Mobilization

Single Platform Pilot Effort One Project Adhoc Approach

2
Monetization

One or Two Platforms Generating Revenue GEO-Focused

3
Globalization

Multi-Platform Support Global Customer Base Effective Mobile Policies

4
Consumerization

Multi-Channel Thinking End-to-End Thinking Cloud

5
Innovation

Extensible Solutions Channel Agnostic Platforms Exploring Business Domains

Talk to Infostretch

We would love to hear more about your project.

Even a short phone call can help us explain how our solutions can accelerate your mobility, jump start your continuous delivery and help reduce costs. And that’s just for starters, understanding more about your project will enable us to build a solution that fits your objectives, infrastructure and aspirations!

Contact us
Our team is available to chat through your project.   Contact us

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