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In your function as a system integrator, mobile developer, software product vendor, or IT-consultant, you are likely well aware of the usual phases of a mobile app implementation. You are also aware that this work cycle can last quite long, with all sorts of unexpected turns along the road. But are you aware that there are quicker and less painful ways?
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Time for the Market to Change
With innovations disrupting the mobile app market by the day, the implementation process can have many more shapes, with shortcuts you would have never imagined. Enterprise mobility development doesn’t have to be an individual one. It doesn’t have to be customized to the extremes.
Still, the market is only slowly turning to the new direction where the phases of planning, development, testing, and launch either disappear or transform to support effectiveness. As a recent Gartner survey revealed, the majority of business keep focusing on custom development, while it is more and more urgent to get up to speed to keep up with employee demand as well as competition. It’s time to change perspective and welcome the solutions that shorten the development cycle!
For one, you can opt for off-the-shelf solutions if you have a general problem to solve and the process you wish to mobilize is not too industry- or company-specific. A setback of these apps is, however, that they leave no space for customization, should you need any, while you pay for features you know you won’t be using.
Luckily, there are also products that combine the advantages of off-the-shelf solutions with those of in-house development. They are simple enough to enable the workers to use them right away, but also allow the businesses to customize many parts of the application easily.
The Quickest Method
You will be surprised how much time and cost can be saved by that unique approach. Instead of the average 18 weeks of mobile development and a common mobility budget of $250,000-$500,000, using a configurable, ready-to-use app might result in an implementation within a couple of days and costs reduced significantly.
By choosing these apps, you will only join the development cycle at the last phase, the actual implementation, supported by a professional partner. Some planning will be required prior to meeting your partner and the app developer, but, ideally, the whole process of planning the features, the look, and the use of the app is already done by the latter.
Instead of working out the technical details of the app development, you can focus on what workflows you wish to mobilize and how your users will profit from it, instead of dedicating much more expensive resources to coding, designing, and testing.
In practice, this means that you will need to set aside some time to select the features you need from a finite selection based on industry standards. Then, you can make the minor adjustments through a web interface: think about authorization settings, necessary attachments, or if a certain function requires employees to upload photos of videos.
If there is no need to integrate the application with a backend system, you’re done with the whole implementation in a day or two. However, if you do need integration, that’s the part that cannot be saved neither with custom development nor with tweakable off-the-shelf solutions. Depending on your efficiency, it could add to the time spent, but should still be covered by the several weeks you’ve saved on the development process.
Updates
In the long term, there is one more step that you have to take into account from time to time: updating your app. A mobile-enabled business can only stay competitive if it makes sure the application it uses keeps up with industry or business trends. So mobile development is always an ongoing project, however, if the process was smooth enough initially, you can count on your provider to make updating painless, too.
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