Welcome back to our series on Gartner’s predictions for mobile apps and development where we examine each strategic planning assumption, and provide our perspective.
This next prediction is related to the topic of providing direct integration between enterprise applications and content from enterprise content management systems.
Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption #3: By 2018, 65% of enterprise apps will include direct access to documents and content from enterprise content management (ECM) systems, up from 20% today.
AnyPresence Take: This prediction isn’t surprising. Although we have seen demand for apps that access documents or content from ECM systems, we think that the growth of these types of apps will remain proportional to demand for other types of apps, such as mobile workflow, business process management, customer self-service, etc. The broader takeaway is that most if not all enterprise mobile apps will access at least one enterprise source system of some sort.
Some enterprise file synchronization and sharing and ECM vendors offer dedicated mobile apps to allow access to corporate content such as documents (Office, PDF, text), and other assets, such as images and video files. However, switching from one app to another, followed by locating the relevant document, is slow and error-prone, and does not lend itself to fitting into other business processes, such as associating documents to operation CRM or ERP data.
A growing number of MBaaS vendors, such as AnyPresence, offer connectors for content management systems, typically via REST or SOAP connectors that can access document metadata from the content management server. This level of integration allows a deeper level of integration between mobile business processes and content.
Apps that integrate document and content access directly into the workflow offer significantly higher levels of engagement. Optimizing mobile process efficiency is often a goal of employee-facing apps, and providing direct access to documents from the relevant part of the process achieves this goal by ensuring:
- Contextual Content: documents can be associated to data in other systems, such as an instruction manual associated with a product record, or a quote associated with a customer account.
- Uninterrupted Flow: documents can be accessed without a jarring interruption in the user experience. There is less need to switch between apps, which on a mobile device can cause a jolt in the user task flow.
Again, the more general implication of this prediction to IT organizations and mobile developers is to ensure that enterprise systems, regardless of content type, are easily accessible to mobile applications. MBaaS solutions should provide robust integration options to (1) consume REST or SOAP web services, (2) connect natively to popular open source or commercial databases, or (3) provide the ability to create APIs that can invoke legacy applications and read command line responses, when they may not have open interfaces.
Stay tuned for our next post in this series, where we provide our take on the fourth Gartner mobile app development strategic planning assumption, related to the increase in mobile apps talking to IoT devices:
By 2018, 25% of new mobile apps will talk to IoT devices.