10 Best Practices for Enterprise Mobile App Development

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Prithvi
August 25, 2014
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Today’s enterprises need to know the secrets of building great enterprise mobile apps in the ever changing mobile industry. Businesses are getting transformed with mobility and as a business and technology leader, you need to know how to leverage mobile solutions effectively to improve your business.

Enterprises need an open and extendible design that allows them to easily and rapidly develop, deploy and manage multiple mobile apps. In other words, the apps developed should engage the users effectively, integrate seamlessly with the existing enterprise infrastructure and be elastically scalable. In this blog, we will discuss about the best practices for enterprise mobile app development.

Best Practices for Enterprise Mobile App Development

Mobility is transforming the enterprise, which is why the industry needs to keep some of the best practice in mind while building enterprise mobile apps.

  • Focus on strategy and mobile use cases: Mobile is transformative. It has become very easy to take what you have and put it on mobile device. However, it is definitely not the best use. Every process is getting transformed. This makes it important to have a clear strategy in mind.
  • Focus on the right app candidate(s): evaluate every app idea which comes in your company against a matrix – the value and business increment it will provide, actual business process involved, security etc. Assign weighted scores and ensure that there is a discipline in managing app requests. Evaluate it objectively.
  • Develop an easy UX: Mobile is all about UX. Users won’t use if you don’t get this right. Better user experience does not means that it should have everything crammed into it. In fact, in mobile it’s more about removing the features rather than adding.
  • Develop an appropriate UI: Yes, I would like iterate that we should un-club the user experience and UI of our enterprise mobile apps. Often people make the mistake of thinking this is the same thing. Once you have developed the User experience, you develop the UI. It is all about being effective. I will make it even simpler – brochure ware apps are all about glamour, whereas productivity apps are about keeping it simple and getting things done.
  • Identify target devices and prototype iteratively
  • Identify the right development toolset: There is so much noise out there – HTML vs. Native vs. Cross Platform vs. Hybrid. It’s better to focus on the use case. Let the use case determine the technology. Understand the app deployment implications, whether the scale going to be large; or load going to be elastic. Choose wisely.
  • Plan for Security & Data: It is intrinsic to the mobile experience. Data input, output, source, data state, data mobilization are just some of the perspective that you need to keep in mind while dealing with enterprise mobile apps.
  • Plan for a thorough testing
  • Plan for Deployment: Plan for the app deployment, whether it’s going to be private app store or a public one. Another option is to have an MDM/MAM solution.
  • Remember, it’s a start: This is the most important aspect of building an enterprise mobile app. Your app development project is a start. Meanwhile, the ecosystem is continuously changing, which your app should keep supporting. Refresh, upgrade & accommodate change, so that users will come back and keep the productivity levels high.