How Enterprise Mobility Solutions is Proving a Game-changer for Businesses?

As per GSMA’s Mobility Economy Report, the IoT connected devices will reach a staggering 25 billion with business-related connected devices deluging the marketplace over consumer-related devices by 2023. The above stats clearly states that businesses are betting on enterprise mobility solutions big time. And why not? When it comes to propelling productivity, nothing beats enterprise apps.

First things first: What’s Enterprise Mobility?

Enterprise Mobility is an approach wherein employees are free to work from anywhere using a range of devices and applications. The term refers to smartphones and tablets used for business purposes. It also includes the mobility of corporate data and workers, as well. For example, an employee preparing a presentation on an office PC, uploading it to a cloud storage device and then accessing it on his iPhone at home. Additionally, Enterprise mobility management (EMM) and similar technologies have emerged to aid IT departments to help mobile workers to take care of security risks.

Currently, enterprise mobility is crucial because it offers employees flexibility and choice, which in turn enhances job satisfaction and accelerates productivity. More importantly, nearly all companies have adopted some form of enterprise mobility these days. Previously, enterprise-class mobile devices such as BlackBerry smartphones were employer-provided. The device enabled the accessing of emails, calendars, and contacts.

In 2007, Apple released the iPhone, and in no time, Google launched its mobile operating system, Android. After that, the concept of app stores was launched to the masses. As more smartphones were being bought, and more apps get developed, the BYOD (bring your own devices) trend was born. So, employees started leveraging their personal smartphones for work and that too without requiring employer permission – given that the apps enabled them to do their work quickly. Simultaneously, with U.S. workers preferring to work out of the office, organizations have formally adopted BYOD policies and flexible work styles.

With an increasing number of devices being used at workplaces, the productivity of the organizations has gone up by 34%. Employees are working 240 hours extra annually.

Plus, 53% of the employees believe that including mobility solutions have made things easier for them. Businesses have witnessed significant growth rates and other benefits, and now reports suggest that companies have already invested $61 billion in mobile app development services in 2018.

With an increasing number of devices being used at workplaces, the productivity of the organizations has gone up by 34%. Employees are working 240 hours extra annually

Plus, 53% of the employees believe that including mobility solutions have made things easier for them. Businesses have witnessed significant growth rates and other benefits, and now reports suggest that companies have already invested $61 billion in mobile app development services in 2018.

Why Next-Gen Companies are Championing Enterprise Mobility Solutions?

Portability, availability, sharing, and data access are the four features that make enterprise mobility solutions popular among businesses. Additionally, it offers real-time features such as streamlined data, ownership of the device, in-built camera, interactive maps, and so much more. Here are some benefits that an enterprise mobility solution can bring to your business:

1. Enhanced Productivity

If anything, embracing enterprise mobility empowers employees to conduct business from anytime and anywhere. The frontend workforce can easily access crucial data such as emails, documents, files, calendar, among many other things from any remote location. So even if your employee is traveling, he can take care of urgent tasks by using their mobile devices. Thus, it offers flexibility and propels productivity. There are several apps that companies can take advantage of to propel their productivity. Some examples include

CamCard: is a free app available on iPhone, Windows, BlackBerry, and Android. It allows employees to scan business cards with their phone cameras. The app immediately, and that too, with a high degree of accuracy, adds the info to the contact list. Also, it saves the image of the original card as a backup.

Trello: If editing documents is your topmost priority, then you can use Trello to prioritize projects via the creation of lists, cards, and boards. It also offers an excellent way to share visual documents like images with your team and all.

Quip: With Quip, you can connect with your creative teams with a personal touch. Though it’s not a free app, for $30 per month, you can use the app to share documents and hold conversations with a group of five. And, yes, it’s web-based, so you don’t have to worry about Comparability issues also. Though businesses can bet on these applications to enhance productivity, there are several other enterprise apps available at the app stores to improvise your business processes.

2. Work from Home a Reality

As it turns out, enterprise mobility gives employees the freedom to work remotely or work from home. This ensures a smooth flow of work without affecting their performance. It also leads to better employee engagement, more accessibility of the latest information, close deals instantly, among many other things.

In fact, some studies show a direct correlation between enterprise mobility and enhanced productivity. For instance, the Aberdeen survey of 240 enterprises found that mobile apps designed to complete work increases productivity by almost 45% and also raised operational efficiency by 44%. U.S. federal government gains an additional nine hours of productivity per week, which equates to $284 billion per year in savings.

3. Decreased Operational Cost

The other biggest plus of enterprise mobility is that it brings down overhead expenses as employees are free to work from home. Plus, if businesses can think of setting up shared workspaces whenever the employees attend the workplace. And if your company has adopted a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policy, it will also aid in lowering the IT cost because you won’t have to bear the IT infrastructure cost.

4. Faster reporting

Adding a mobile reporting system to mobility solutions of businesses enables employees to report faster on projects. Plus, the management is free to review these reports on any device at any point in time. This makes it easier to figure out top performers as well as find weak links to take appropriate actions.

5. Competent data collection

Another benefit that businesses could look forward to by investing in a mobility solution is the generation of valuable data. The advantage of insightful data is that it helps you to make intelligent business decisions to further business improvements, specifically in terms of market research to point-of-sale systems.

Enterprise Mobile Apps: Build vs Buy - Top considerations to make the right decision

Applications forms the core of mobility, which is ruling the roost and dominating every sphere of human realm. Be it making calls, sending messages, scheduling events or even shopping online, everything is done mobile that is replacing the age old desktops and even more recently our laptops. Considering the market potential and its promising future, many software companies and other small time vendors are slowing foraying into mobile application development to grab a pie of the market share. On the other hand, organizations too are embracing mobility in a bigger way with a plethora of enterprise mobile apps under their belt to take care of nitty-gritty of day to day commercial or business operations.

From an organizational standpoint, the biggest question that may crop up in your mind is whether you need to develop apps in-house or purchase already popular apps and customize them, as per your organization’s requirements. This question seems daunting and plagued with several challenges that one needs to cope up with. Though organizations can embark on mobile app development; however, mobile development being a niche area, it requires unique skills and sizeable investments. On the other hand, already existing apps (publicly available) apps pose a lower barrier to adoption, but are plagued with their own set of challenges, from management, security and licensing perspectives. As they are developed taking into consideration the mindset of mass audiences, at times, they may fail to meet an organization’s specific requirements. Of course, various hybrid approaches have come into existence to enable businesses deploy customized apps with their existing approaches.

This blog explores these aspects in detail and provides certain key pointers to help you arrive at the best decision, whether you need to build or buy mobile apps. First of all, deciding whether to build or buy enterprise mobile apps is basically dependent on your unique organizational workflow, time & resource constraints and the value these apps can add to your organization.

Some of the key pointers that can help you to make the right decision are discussed below:

1. Resource constraints This is the primary aspect that most of the organizations are concerned as everything runs on the company’s budgetary allocations vis-à-vis value that it can add to the overall organizational efficiency. Obviously, developing your own app from the scratch to meet your unique business requirements, say automating your production department or payroll needs considerable investment in terms of manpower and finance. However, if your organization is big and the app you develop is expected to have a greater impact on key users of a specific business operation, it makes sense to embark on the new app development. However, if your organization is small and lack the necessary bandwidth to support heavy investments, it is prudent to buy an app and later customize it to meet your requirements. Purchasing an enterprise app seems economical, but, one aspect that needs to be taken care of is the flexibility of customization that it can offer to a customer to meet their specific needs.

2. Strategic sourcing considerations The IT department of your organization may know which business functions they want to mobilize, but might lack the clear cut road map to develop the corresponding applications. As we have discussed in the first point that smaller companies may not have the requisite expertise or infrastructure to carry out in-house development, one of the alternative options is to strategically outsource their mobile app development to a third party vendor to help them achieve their objectives. In fact, even bigger organizations that have a flexible budget, but without immediate in-house developers can consider appointing a contractor to create or customize programs to meet their company’s specifications. Again there are two variations in such a scenario. The first model is synonymous to internal development, wherein an organization hires a skilled developer to develop new custom apps. On the other hand, the second model of outsourcing involves minor tweaks or configuration to an app that is already available, without much burden on the outsourced organization. The basic advantage of strategic sourcing for an organization is it minimize the overheads and the potential complications of developing the applications in-house.

3. Technical Architecture Companies are ever eager to deliver the best apps to reach out a global mobile audience; however, they face uncertainty about how to proceed in this incredibly dynamic environment. The right architectural framework that an organization can select is dependent on the mobile development that it chooses – native, cross mobile platform or a mobile web solution. Considering that there are several commercial architectural platforms available in the market, an organization need to understand what features are important before investing in a particular approach. Native development approach provides the best user experience, but at a higher cost, which may not be prudent for an organization with limited resources. On the other hand, cross-platform networks, though offers economies of scale, suffer from user experience aspect and mobile web app model, though offers a wider reach, may end up in problems concerning performance and user experience. When automating a typical business function, you need to consider various parameters including the key workflows that needs to be automated, number of business users, infrastructure and deployment strategies. Based on these parameters, you can embark on the right architectural strategy for mobile app development.

4. Business Requirements This is the most important aspect that can impact your decision to either develop a mobile app or right away purchase an app. From an organizational perspective, you need to consider certain factors such as the: • Scale of operations that needs automation • Number of business users who would be using your app • Option to provide offline support • Typical return on investment (RoI) that you can expect • Number of platforms you need to support – Windows, Android or iOS • Flexibility for customization • Deployment strategies – on premise or cloud Based on these aspects, you can decide which approach suits best and moreover, when there are limited business cases that needs automation or if an enterprise app is already available that perfectly plugs into your current workflow (for instance, automating the goods receivables process), it makes sense to right away purchase the app with minor tweets to meet your requirements.

5. Security considerations Embarking on a perfect mobile strategy to build or buy an app is only part of a bigger story – the important aspect here is security, which in any way cannot be ignored. Even if your enterprise app has best-in-class features, supporting your business cases, however, if it doesn’t meet the minimal security requirements, it falls flat and is rendered useless. Organizations are very much concerned about the data security in the backdrop of the “bring your own mobile (BYOD)” strategy that is rapidly gaining ground. An organization need to keep its confidential data secure, when allowing its employees to access its apps to perform typical business functions and on the other hand, users need to keep their personal/business data secure, without falling prey to data tampering or theft. In fact, every organization has its own set of security parameters, based on the industry vertical and in such a scenario, commercially available apps may not perfectly meet the security requirements for a specific organizational setup. If your organization places high emphasis on data security (for instance, in a banking organizational setup), you may prefer to develop your own app, integrating all the required security features that you intend to enforce, rather than buying a commercially available app with compromised security paradigms

6. Ongoing support If you have decided to purchase an enterprise app that could typically match your business requirements, look for a vendor that can offer ongoing support for the purchased app for a specified time period. This assumes significance, since your workforce, who may not be techno-savvy need time to adopt the solution to leverage its maximum potential. This means, the vendor is expected to offer after sales support in the form of user training at the initial stage to increase high mobility adoption. However, if the mobile solution that you intend to purchase has to support multiple workflows of a specific business function, offering minimal after sales support, it is better to build the application in-house, rather than depending on third-party vendors.

The above discussion lend some credibility about the best decision you could embark – build or buy, as per your unique organizational requirements. However, to guide you further in this initiative, you need the help of a reliable partner to support at every stage of your mobile strategy. This way, it can help prepare your organization for long-term success with mobility

From the above backdrop, ASAP Data Solutions that is focused on enabling instant mobilization to global customers can take the lead to realize your business objectives. ASAP Data Solutions can create a strategic plan to help you decide on the best solution strategy in tune with your budgetary considerations. This way, ASAP Data Solutions can put you ahead of your competitors, thereby providing a mechanism to enhance employees’ productivity, improve RoI and embark on a visionary path for long terms success.