IT can spend a tremendous amount of time developing complex, line-of-business mobile apps, maintaining and updating them, and providing support for those who use them. Custom mobile apps built for multiple platforms require significantly more resources to test and support them. If you're not using rapid mobile application development software, updating native applications requires separate mobile apps for each platform. Maintaining multiple implementations of the same mobile application can be difficult. Building mobile business apps is costly and time-consuming and takes up far too many enterprise resources.
A number of people say there's a surprisingly easy solution to the problem: Keep it simple. Rather than spend all that time and resources on building complex mobile applications, focusing instead on providing simple, basic ones may be the best mobile strategy.
So reports Alyssa Wood in a TechTarget article. Experts told her that it's smart to focus mobile app efforts first on the basics, such as providing secure email access, and the ability to perform important everyday tasks.
Keeping Mobile Apps Simple
Richard Absalom, a senior analyst at the research firm Ovum told her, "For a lot of workers, mobility does still essentially mean access to email and maybe a couple of productivity apps."
And Andrew Cohen, CEO of application refactoring vendor PowWow Mobile said, "If you're going to empower everyone to be on their iPads, you have to get the productivity stuff on there before you get the complex apps on."
There's evidence that many companies already recognize that, and aren't rushing to build mobile line-of-business apps. A Gartner report, "Mobility Is Having a Major Impact on IT Support", found that only 40% of enterprises surveyed were delivering line-of-business apps.
That report also warns that mobile support will take up an increasing amount of IT support time. In late 2014, the report says, mobile support "represented about 17% of the IT service desk workload." Gartner says that will rise to 40 percent, in large part due to supporting an increased number of line-of-business apps. That means that creating simpler apps has one more benefit, cutting into that need for support.
Look also for a development platform that makes it easy to build those basic apps, including templating features, like Alpha Anywhere.
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