We’re back for the final part of our blog series on Gartner’s predictions for mobile apps and development. We’ve examined each strategic planning assumption, and provided our perspective. This final prediction relates to the overall successful rate of enterprise mobile apps.
Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption #5: By 2019, one out of three new business-to-employee (B2E) mobile apps will fail within six months of launch.
AnyPresence Take: We think this assumption could indeed be true, since the rate at which mobile applications are needed and must be developed in the enterprise far outstrip the available bandwidth (Gartner estimates the demand to outweigh development capacity by as much as 5 to 1). IT can simply not keep up and we hear the same problem with our customers trying to mobile enable their business processes but IT governance and security regulations hold them back. Apps that are hurriedly assembled by business unit developers without sufficient experience, or contracted to low-end outsourced developers, will likely fail due to poor planning, technology decisions, and lack of maintenance.
Mobile app development in the enterprise is accelerating. In order to satisfy the demand, enterprises continue to utilize a mixture of outsourcing and internal IT development, but increasingly enterprise resources outside IT is getting involved, either in the development process or owning it outright.
In particular, the availability of easy-to-procure and simple-to-use development tools will pave the way for citizen developers to emerge in addressing mobile app development in a decentralized manner.
While we believe citizen developers should be encouraged, we also believe they should be “enabled” properly. Traditional methods of siloed development can be both timely and costly, with very little concern for security, IT governance, best practices, or longer term maintenance and reusability. A blended approach to application development should be utilized.
AnyPresence’s MBaaS platform and App LaunchPad technology can help IT foster citizen developer innovation without sacrificing governance. The platform enables IT to define app templates that determine how corporate identity and data sources are accessed. These templates can then be published for selection and configuration through any web portal, such as a developer zone or innovation hub for employees to use. Furthermore, the templates can often be reused by people outside of IT, and applicable to many app needs. While there is no guarantee of adoption, with an an IT approved template, there is less chance of performance and security issues, and the failure rate of the applications due to those causes dramatically decreases. With solutions like AnyPresence, IT departments can strike a better balance around enabling citizen developers without as much risk and technical debt to the organization.
We hope you enjoyed this final blog in our series. As always, we’re interested in hearing from you on challenges and wins in mobile app development, IoT and ecosystem enablement, drop us a line at info@anypresence.com if you’d like to share your thoughts!