Understanding Enterprise Mobile App Development

As the number of people using mobile devices continues to increase, the demand for enterprise mobile app development is growing exponentially. According to a survey, 79% of the US companies give mobile enterprise apps the largest contributor to their organizational success. However, enterprise mobile application development is transforming how organizations work by causing disruption in the traditional processes and improving operations of enterprises that have adopted digital transformation.

 Enterprise mobile application development offers beneficial solutions to all stakeholders, including business owners, employees, and customers. Some of the benefits of successful enterprise mobile application development include achieving competitive advantage, increased staff efficiency, and workflow automation.

In this article, we look at all major areas that will help you understand enterprise mobile app development.

What is Enterprise Mobile App Development?

Enterprise mobile app development creates and deploys trusted, portable, and scalable mobile applications that help large organizations engage properly with all the stakeholders, including employees, customers, and partners. A field worker in a given enterprise requires to be linked to a colleague at a desk or other departments in the organization. Enterprise mobile app development makes this connectivity possible while ensuring large organizations remain secure and reliable.

Most enterprises look for ways to ensure they have their applications on mobile devices within a short period and without incurring huge expenses. Fortunately, there are various development strategies that can be used to create mobile apps. A services-based development strategy that comes with integrated mobile capabilities has become a standard method.

Factors to Consider When Building a Mobile Application

Before you start your journey on enterprise mobile app development, there are some factors that you need to consider first. These include:

Business objectives

First, you should understand the kind of product that your company expects and how the product corresponds to the business objectives. In short, you need to know the solutions that you want to provide before embarking on investing your time in app development. It is also important to think about the end-users when setting your goals for enterprise app development.

Administration

Enterprise mobile app development is a practice that involves a complex process. The process requires a lot of legal work and administration, which adds to the team's development efforts. Therefore, before looking for software developers, you should also be aware of the team that will handle the other issues. You also remember that once the enterprise mobile app is ready, you will also have to train your employees on how to use it. 

Integration with other applications

Before you jump into enterprise mobile app development, you need to decide whether you intend to integrate your enterprise mobile app with other applications. Usually, you may need to integrate the enterprise mobile app with the other applications that your employees are using. These applications may include a customer relationship management (CRM) system such as Salesforce or Hubspot.

Security

Large organizations have to maintain their reliability and security even as they seek to undergo digital transformation. Introducing enterprise apps to the mobile devices of the employees puts the corporate data at risk. 

Therefore, you need to understand the potential security issues before you get into enterprise mobile app development so as to build a bulletproof system to protect the corporate data. The product should allow employees to log into the app safely and transfer data securely without risking corporate information.

Choosing the platform

Finally, you need to decide the platform on which you want your enterprise mobile application to run in order to plan accordingly on the development. For instance, if you want your employees to use the enterprise mobile app on their devices, you have to choose cross-platform to ensure that the app is able to work on various platforms and devices.

Modern Approach to Enterprise Mobile Application Development

In the era of fast-changing technology, companies have to adopt modern approaches to ensure that their products are unique and able to meet new customer demands and needs. Embracing innovation in mobile application development enables the company to maximize the benefits of building the enterprise app.

Enterprise Design Thinking

This is an IBM framework that allows generating ideas, designing, developing, and delivering enterprise mobile solutions within the shortest time possible. The approach combines the elements of traditional design techniques and design thinking methodology. Enterprise Design Thinking has three core practices, hills, playbacks, and sponsor users.

• Hills: The practice requires developers to focus on desired, measurable outcomes in enterprise mobile app development rather than focusing on feature requests. Each project should include hill objectives.

• Playbacks: It demands that you receive feedback after designing and revise the design before proceeding with the development process. The practice allows you to align the development process with the objectives.

• Sponsor users: Get feedback from potential users at different design and development stages.

Think cross-platform, design for mobile

The introduction of mobile devices has brought a great change in designing applications. Therefore, it is important to consider how people will use the enterprise mobile app rather than focusing only on building an application with lots of functions. Moreover, you also need to think about why the users need the app first, how they will interact with it, and the devices that they are more likely to use.

With that in mind, the chances are that you will consider creating a cross-platform app. Most users will prefer to use the app on mobile devices while on the go, but they might also prefer to use a laptop in some cases. Therefore, you also need to create a multi-device app that allows smooth transition on different platforms.

Leverage Cloud technology

Creating mobile applications based on cloud computing technology is one of the latest trends in application development. Cloud-based applications come with numerous benefits, including enhanced performance, reduced time-to-market, reduced development costs, and application scalability. When it comes to enterprise mobile apps, cloud computing allows large data volume integration. This leads to streamlining work processes and fast employee communication.

Testing and Quality Assurance

Testing and quality assurance are critically important for enterprise mobile app development. Quality assurance practices ensure that mobile products are not delivered to users with numerous bugs or any defects.

Conclusion

In the modern technology era, companies have to keep up with the latest innovations to achieve sustainable growth and also maintain a competitive edge. Enterprise mobile app development is a huge step towards digital transformation. However, selecting the ideal platform for enterprise mobile application development is the most important part of developing a customized app.

Author

Thanh Pham (Bruce), CEO of Saigon Technology