Trending Technology-Enterprise Mobility Apps

Times are changing and so are your customer and employee base. With millennials set to become your largest set of internal and external customers, it's time to give due consideration to embracing mobility in your enterprise fold. Today customer experience is about delivering customer delight at every touch point. These touch points range from keeping them informed, to servicing them, to resolving their issues, to making them feel proud of associating with you as a brand.

Mobility is one such critical customer touch-points for any business. It is actually the most critical of the many ways customers interact with organizations today, more so with the trend towards non-human interactions on the rise. The only interface that customers ever use is a mobile interface, through an app or various channels such as social or text. What makes mobility even more critical is that employees of an organization expect the same mobile driven user experience from enterprise applications used for their day-today tasks.

Therefore Enterprise Mobility Applications have become critical.

Mobility - Key ingredient for Great Customer Experience

Today, a smart phone is an extension of a person’s work life and personal life. Workers expect to be able to perform their tasks on the go, in the same manner as they accomplish their personal chores on mobile. In personal lives, they are spoilt for choices, and that is fast becoming a reality for SaaS enabled enterprise applications as well. The challenge for IT leaders is to provide the business users the overall mobile based process experience and to provide them fast, very fast.

Another key aspect of this shift is that people want to be able to participate in the processes as easily as possible and from anywhere. Traditional ERP systems have been transactions oriented, and involved data heavy forms with built-in workflows hidden underneath. The expectation today is to allow people to execute their tasks timely without having to wait to get to the workstation. This requires the organization to not only build a mobile applications framework, but also create a process based platform that abstracts out the process aspects from the monolithic ERP and other backend systems. This also means that integration with backend systems needs a more cohesive and framework based approach based on the user facing process requirements.

Enterprise Mobility Speed breakers

The importance of enterprise mobility is not lost on organizations and IT leaders. The market is changing faster than they can cope with, and mobility brings in another order of complexity in their application development - with the requirement of a holistic user experience through mobile interfaces.

Enterprises spend tremendous energy in building up the required backend infrastructure and applications on mobile. However, Enterprise IT teams struggle with a set of challenges that prevent them from achieving much needed speed of implementation:

* Every app had its own domain and technology needs

* Mobile technology ecosystem is highly fragmented

* Apps have to still deal with underlying process silos

* Business user community cannot provide inputs easily without getting their hands on to the app

* With diverse underlying data & business logic, straight-through integration is a key obstacle

* It’s nearly impossible to get a consistent experience and performance across apps without a robust enterprise mobility framework

Navigating the mobility speed breakers with Mobility Framework

A Configurable BPM based Enterprise Mobility Framework that is geared for smart process application development can help enterprises to quickly develop and deploy enterprise scale mobile apps-

Mass Customization: Configurability of business use cases is the most potent weapon for accomplishing rapid mobility. It involves configurable processes, configurable user forms, pluggable custom data validations, multi-font and multi-lingual support out of the box, and most importantly, the ability to define and configure most of these functionality with minimal or zero coding.

Cross-Platform capability: One of the biggest deterrents to enterprise scale development is the fragmented OS ecosystem. Apps need to be supported at the minimum on iOS and mainstream Android platforms. A framework that natively supports the major operating systems provide a tremendous head start to the mobile app development efforts.

Configurable Platform: For an effective mobile application, a basic set of functionality from an end-user perspective is required. Most of these expectations are independent of the specific area, and are horizontal in nature - applicable across a wide array of business use cases. A robust underlying platform that is configurable to suit specific functional needs of the varied use cases makes a big difference to the mobility lifecycle of an application. The underlying configurable platform needs to have some functionality in order to enable the smart process applications needed for enterprise workers.

* Workflow Orchestration. Most business use cases involve a workflow that is driven in the backend by an orchestration engine. These work steps, when configured and exposed as part of the mobile application, improves the on-the-go productivity of mobile workers.

* Digitization and Imaging. An inherent support for document digitization and imaging provides nonlinear scale to development and deployment cycle.

* Business Rules. Abstraction of key business logic and business rules is an important aspect of a smart process application. Configurability of these business rules outside of code allows for rapid development and deployment of mobile apps.

Integration Readiness: In most mobile app development efforts, integration efforts cause majority of confusion and delays. A set of adapters that are integration-ready for major backend systems and ERPs enables a relatively smoother journey to an end-to-end high performance mobile application. It’s also important to understand that apart from some functional integrations to the backend systems, integration to a central workflow orchestration engine and enterprise document management system is critical. A framework that comes ready to integrate with these systems goes a long way in making rapid mobility possible.

Mobility Accelerators: There are thousands of enterprise use cases that are pretty standard in terms of general functionality, barring some specific ways organizations customize these processes to suit their environment and culture. Customer on-boarding, customer service request management, approval heavy HR transactions, claims processing are some such examples. A suite of such mobile applications accelerator coupled with highly configurable platform provides the real thrust to rapid mobility. Over and above that, some of the standard reporting and dashboards can also provide the ability to go live as the first iteration with iterative configurability and improvement as one goes along in mobility journey. Not only that, today’s enterprise applications also leverage new age technological advancements in geo-tagging, location intelligence, in-built mobile imaging, and notifications & alerts.

A central configurable platform equipped with accelerators for all common use cases and integration-readiness paves the path for rapid enterprise mobility.

Virender Jeet
Sr. VP Technology at Newgen Software

Tags: Trending Technology, Enterprise Mobility Apps, Virender Jeet Newgen Software, Enterprise Mobility Speed breakers