Apps and the Enterprise

August 11, 2010
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WRITTEN BY
August 11, 2010

Kelly Chu

Today there are thou­sands of app devel­op­ers and count­ing. New app devel­op­ers seem to pop out of the wood work every day. How can one app devel­op­er stand out when there are over 500,000+ con­sumer apps across var­i­ous mobile plat­forms? The cre­ators of today’s most preva­lent smart­phone oper­at­ing sys­tems (i.e. iOS and Android) has made app devel­op­ment so easy and straight­for­ward that almost any­one with some pro­gram­ming knowl­edge can pro­duce apps. To stand out among the sea of app devel­op­ers we not only focus on cross-plat­form app devel­op­ment, but apps for the Enterprise.
Why does the Enter­prise need apps; the same rea­son why com­pa­nies need the web for intranets, online col­lab­o­ra­tion ser­vices, and data pro­cess­ing. Mobile apps can pro­vide effi­cien­cies across the enter­prise and allow access to real-time infor­ma­tion that pre­vi­ous­ly required access to a com­put­er or print­ed reports that become out­dat­ed the moment the ink touch­es paper. Every com­pa­ny and orga­ni­za­tion has spe­cif­ic busi­ness needs that if trans­formed into a mobile app can be acces­si­ble at any­time and any loca­tion. As the mobile app ecosys­tem comes out of its infan­cy and becomes a stan­dard in the way we con­sume infor­ma­tion, com­pa­nies will tread towards mak­ing mobile work for them.
Find­ing the right devel­op­er to build an app for your enter­prise requires some due dili­gence. The cur­rent mobile devel­op­ment com­mu­ni­ty is filled with young mobile devel­op­ers lack­ing the expe­ri­ence in large soft­ware devel­op­ment projects. Build­ing scal­able apps for the enter­prise requires the following:
  • Project Man­age­ment and Require­ments Gathering
  • Infor­ma­tion Architecture
  • Tech­ni­cal Archi­tec­ture and Sys­tems Design
  • Larg­er Soft­ware Devel­op­ment Teams
  • Inte­grat­ing apps with exist­ing sys­tems (i.e. CRM, CMS, busi­ness intel­li­gence, and data reporting)
  • Thor­ough doc­u­men­ta­tion (i.e. Func­tion­al Require­ments, Use Cas­es, Tech­ni­cal Specifications)
The num­ber one fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with most app devel­op­ers is the lack of back­end sys­tems knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence need­ed to build effec­tive and effi­cient mobile apps. All busi­ness­es today have some form of elec­tron­ic sys­tem that tracks com­pa­ny data such as Quick­books, Sales­force, and cus­tom data­base dri­ven web ERP and CRM tools. A good app devel­op­er should be able to build a mobile solu­tion that inte­grates with all of these sys­tems and pro­vide the infor­ma­tion at your fin­ger tips (lit­er­al­ly).
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