We are launching a new blog series to help you improve on your mobile strategy, processes and infrastructure. Come back every week to read more tips and advice and be on your way to build a groundbreaking mobile enterprise strategy.
In our mobile-first era, most organizations understand the importance of building a strong strategy around enterprise mobility. However, building cross-platform mobile apps presents more complex challenges than previous web or client-server technology. At an accelerating pace, the number of devices is exploding, users are expecting more frequent updates, and IT infrastructure is increasing in complexity. This blog series aims to help you understand and navigate this new mobile-first environment, by covering various business and technical requirements you must address to build a solid yet flexible and resilient mobility strategy.
Today, we will start from the beginning and as you probably know, successful apps always start with understanding end user needs. So, your very first task is going to study your users’ world inside and out.
1) Talk to all users of your IT infrastructure
Begin by interviewing them and open the lines of communication. Remember, an interview should be a two-way conversation. On one hand, you want to know what their expectations are; but on the other hand, they want to know what your motivations and plans are as well. This is also the perfect time to set expectations that you won’t be able to mobilize all business processes or legacy applications at once, but will follow a well-considered, incremental approach. By including them in this process, you are also starting to build a solid foundation for the improving app adoption, which is key to success.
2) Investigate your users app usage
Nobody likes to have someone watch over their shoulders, but they probably wouldn’t mind sharing some information about the devices they prefer to use and the types of apps installed on each of those devices. You can also ask for some details around usage frequency, what the users like or don’t about those apps, and where they think could be improved. To understand which existing legacy applications and processes make sense to mobilize, you will also need a list of all the legacy enterprise software applications they use on a regular basis on their laptops and the corresponding data sources. Once you have a list of commonly used mobile and legacy applications, you can begin to chart an informed course of where to invest from an enterprise mobile app perspective.
3) Understand roles and responsibilities in and outside your organization
The next step is to identify the different user profiles that co-exist within the organization’s departments (sales representative, HR manager, IT developer, etc.) and outside the organization (channel partners, customers, supply chain partners, etc.). You will want to understand each user role or persona, their daily activities, the different process workflows they are following, and what systems they interact with as they perform their job functions. Based on this additional analysis, you can create user profiles and define their associated use case scenarios.
4) Understand constraints and policies
Apps will need to comply with all enterprise and departmental policies or industry regulations. You will need to inventory all relevant IT policies, such as device management, application management, application security, data retention, compliance, and others, and evaluate how they impact requirements for the mobile apps you plan to develop.
5) Engage your users in the design
Once you have mapped out the current state of users, roles, data sources, and candidate apps to build, you can engage the users to help map out the ideal future state based on priorities and taking into account any resource constraints such as time and cost. By asking your target user groups to challenge the status quo and brainstorm how new apps could improve their daily jobs, you may uncover new and innovative ways to boost productivity while lowering app development costs.
At the end of this exercise, you should have a good understanding of your enterprise mobility needs. From here, your next step is to build a roadmap detailing how you are going to execute on this mobilization roadmap.