*Disclaimer*: The Blog Is Meant to Wake you Before You Make Grand Enterprise Application Mistakes. We don’t want you to fail.
While it takes a lot of effort to build an app into success, it’s fairly easy to plan its failure well in advance. The chances of pushing your app towards making it a failure is not difficult. All you have to do is miss out on things that the employees need or you can simply keep users out of the enterprise app development process.
If that was not enough, here are the five ways you can guarantee your enterprise app failure
1. Wrong Problem Identification
In your typical corporate setup, there can be over 500 different functions, when the primary ones are broken down to different processes. Identifying which ones of those functions would benefit and become more efficient when mobility is introduced to them, is a crucial decision to make.
There can be many work process issues which might seem crucial and long term right now, such as managing mass recruitment processes, but they might be seasonal in nature. So, wrong identification of which problem actually needs to be solved or which process needs to be changed is your shortcut to enterprise app failure.
If it’s getting too difficult to navigate within the app, if the app is filled with functionalities that are not important for moving a task from point A to Point D, or if your enterprise app asks users to sign in with different credentials to view a report, or by simply not allowing them to leave your app to perform even the basic of their device’s functions, they won’t stay for long.
The second employees realize that they were better off before there was even an app to “ease” their processes, your enterprise app is doomed.
3. No Access to App Analytics
You develop an enterprise app that was meant to streamline the teams, make them more efficient, and enable better tracking and you see it working right in your favour. You see evident changes in team’s performance. But when the management asks you to show numbers, you are lost.
While you see the positive changes, there is no way to translate them into numbers. This happened because you missed out on adding app analytics in your enterprise app development process.
By missing out on adding features that would showcase how employees are working inside the app and what are their pain points, you close down all scope of further improvement.
4. Lack of Marketing
While the top management knows that you are creating an enterprise app that will be floated down to the concerned team once done, but the team doesn’t have an idea. They have not been given any heads up on how their working process is going to change, how it is going to save their time and make them more efficient.
What do you expect the first reaction would be when one day suddenly, the team is asked to move their reports on ABC Enterprise App?
I know I would have not taken it easy nor I would have invested my time in knowing the app’s functionality and plus points.
If you are not following the golden rule of greater the marketing efforts greater the acceptance rate, your enterprise mobile application development process is going to fail, massively.
5. Not involving the Team Seeking Change
Imagine you are developing an app for streamlining the offshore and in house sales team. So you meet up with the management team who give you a basic idea of the issues that are there and just at the back of that discussion you start developing the app.
You don’t bother to sit with the offshore and the company’s in house team to understand exactly what issues they are facing, if it’s on site network issue or lack of a platform where the reports are present.
If that was not enough, you don’t involve the team when deciding the app’s functionalities as well. You straight away go to the deployment stage even without passing the app across the team for review and feedback.
So here are the ways you would be preparing your enterprise mobile app for not just your failure but also for the failure of company’s efficiency.
Irrespective of which industry you look at, you will find entrepreneurs hustling to kickstart their digital transformation efforts which have been lying in the backdrop since several business years. While a considerably easy move when you have to alter your digital offering according to the customers’ needs, things become a little difficult when you start planning digital transformation for your business. A difficulty that mobile applications can solve. There are two prime elements which businesses need to focus on when planning to digital transform their workflow and workforce: adaptability and portability. And by bringing their processes and communications on mobile apps, they are able to hit both the targets in one go. Here are some statistics looking into why enterprises need to count mobile application in, in their digital transformation strategy –
Although the above graph should be a reason enough to take mobile apps seriously, there are some other numbers as well.
57% of the digital media use comes in through apps.
On an average, any smartphone user has over 80 apps out of which they use 40 apps every month.
21% of millennials visit a mobile application 50+ times everyday.
While the statistics establish the rising growth of mobile apps, what we intend to cover in the article is the pivotal role mobile applications play in digital business transformation. To understand it from the entirety, we will first have to look into what is digital transformation and what it entails.
What is digital transformation?
Digital transformation means using digital technologies for changing how a business operates, fundamentally. It offers businesses a chance to reimagine how they engage with the customers, how they create new processes, and ultimately how they deliver value.
The true capabilities of introducing digital transformation in business lies in making a company more agile, lean, and competitive. The end of the long term commitment results in several benefits.
Benefits of digital transformation for a business
Greater efficiency – leveraging new technologies for automating processes leads to greater efficiency, which in turn, lowers the workforce requirements and cost-saving processes.
Better decision making – through digitalized information, businesses can tap in the insights present in data. This, in turn, helps management make informed decisions on the basis of quality intelligence.
Greater reach – digitalization opens you to omnichannel presence which enables your customers to access your services or products from across the globe.
Intuitive customer experience – digital transformation gives you the access to use data for understanding your customers better enabling you to know their needs and delivering them a personalized experience.
Merging mobile app capabilities with digital transformation outcomes
The role of mobile applications can be introduced in all the areas which are also often the key areas of digital transformation challenges that an enterprise faces.
Technology integration
Better customer experience
Improved operations
Changed organizational structure
When you partner with a digital transformation consulting firm that holds expertise in enterprise app development, they work around all these above-mentioned areas in addition to shaping their digital transformation roadmap around technology, process, and people.
In addition to a seamless integration with the digital transformation strategy of an enterprise, there are a number of reasons behind the growing need to adopt digital transformation across sectors. Ones that encompasses and expands beyond the reasons to invest in enterprise mobility solutions.
The multitude of reasons, cumulatively, makes mobility a prime solution offering of the US digital transformation market.
Here’s how mobile apps are playing an active role in an enterprise’s 360 digital transformation.
How are mobile apps playing a role in advancing businesses’ internal digital transformation efforts?
1. By utilizing AI in mobile apps
The benefits of using AI for bettering customer experience is uncontested. Through digital transformation, businesses have started using AI for developing intuitive mobile apps using technologies like natural language processing, natural language generation, speech recognition technology, chatbots, and biometrics.
AI doesn’t just help with automation of processes and with predictive, preventative analysis but also with serving customers in a way they want to be served.
2. An onset of IoT mobile apps
The time when IoT was used for displaying products and sharing information is sliding by. The use cases of mobile apps in the IoT domain is constantly expanding.
Enterprises are using IoT mobile apps to operate smart equipment in their offices and making the supply chains efficient, transparent. While still a new entrant in the enterprise sector, IoT mobile apps are finding ways to strengthen their position in the business world.
3. Making informed decisions via real-time analytics
In the current business world, access to real-time analytics can give you a strong competitive advantage. Mobile applications are a great way for businesses to collect users’ data and engage with them through marketing transformation messages designed around the analytics based on their app journey.
You can use real-time analytics to know how your teams are performing, analyze their productivity, and get a first-hand view into the problems they are facing in performing a task and how it’s impacting the overall business value.
4. Greater portability
Portability in an enterprise ecosystem enables employees to work as per their convenience. While it shows less impact in the short term, in the long run, it plays a huge role in how productive a team is.
By giving employees the space to work as per the time and location of their choice, you give them the space to boost their creativity fuel and in turn productivity. One of the results of using software that enabled our employees to work according to their terms and conveniences for us was greater business expansion ideas and an increase in overall productivity of the workforce.
Tips to consider when making mobile apps a part of the digital transformation strategy
If at this stage, you are convinced that mobile applications are a key part of digital transformation efforts, here are some tips that can help your strategies for increasing the ROI on your enterprise app –
Adopt mobile-first approach – the key factor that separates enterprise apps that are winning is how they don’t treat apps as the extension of their websites. Their software development process is strictly mobile-only. This in turn shapes their entire design, development, and testing processes.
Identifying the scope of mobility – the next tip that digital transformation consulting firms would give you is analyzing the operations and workflows for understanding which teams, departments, or functions would benefit from mobility the most. You should not start reinventing a process which works okay, you should look for areas which can be streamlined, automated, or valued through mobility.
Outsourcing digital transformation efforts – when we were preparing An Entrepreneur’s Guide on Outsourcing Digital Transformation article, we looked into several benefits of outsourcing digitalization to a digital transformation strategy consulting agency. But the prime benefit revolved around saving businesses’ efforts and time which goes into solving challenges like – absence of digital skillset, limitations of the agile transformation process, or the inability to let go of the legacy systems.
It wasn’t that long ago that data was a necessary but costly business byproduct that many companies shelved on leftover and decommissioned hardware, and only because they were legally required to do so. That’s changed, of course. Data’s value has grown exponentially in just the last few years because we’ve found that when you combine, analyze and exploit it in the right ways, it can tell you some amazing things about your company and your customers.
A big step in that direction is the concept of “data democratization.” The idea is simple. When you make data available to anyone at any time to make decisions, without limits related to access or understanding, you’re able to realize the full value of the data you maintain. Where IT was once the gatekeeper of data, new tools and technologies help any user gain access. Insights from that data can be developed by anyone, not just a data engineer or data scientist.
Case in point: Many analytics platforms offer some level of universal access to information, but the ability to use it is inherently restricted to people who understand how to use complex analytics tools. However, self-service tools, like Zaloni, are helping to democratize those analytics platforms. By combining drag-and-drop user interfaces with a powerful data catalog used to search for data, these tools can help non-technical users identify relevant data sources and create new datasets tailored specifically for an analytics task.
Data democratization isn’t just a benefit for end users, it liberates data scientists as well. With users able to run their own queries, data scientists and engineers can spend more time identifying data sources, preparing them for ingestion, and cleaning and documenting them for use.
Implementing modern, self-service enabled tools raises new questions about security and privacy, so it’s important for companies to have governance in place that can ensure data is carefully managed. Additionally, anyone who plans to use these tools still needs to receive training—not only on how to use the tools, but how to ask questions and seek insights that are valuable to the company. Having governance in place for your self-service tools ensures data privacy and data quality, provides data lineage, and allows a company to provide role-based access control to data. Zaloni’s UI, for example, ensures self-guided access to data to easily get answers to questions and access pertinent data. In today’s highly regulated world, right-sized data governance and role-based security have become a requirement, not just a nice to have.
Many companies have been accumulating vast troves of data that contains a lot of unrealized value. Implementing tools that give everyone access to that data and help them explore new ideas and connections is likely to result in some surprising and valuable discoveries.
The sole difference between a successful app and the one that fails boils down to the amount of value that they offer to the users. Greater the value users derive from the app, greater is its stickiness. In the race of offering maximum value to the users, a number of brands have moved to integration of embedded analytics in their mobile application. A strategy that seems to be working for a number of businesses, across industries.
And the reason behind this success is the heavy inclusion and working around with data.
Data is the one element that is present and every user seeks in one way or the other, the second they connect their device or application to the internet. It is by giving users the power of data and analysis, brands are able to place themselves as high value offering businesses, those whose association would only benefit the users.
Let us look into this new wave of app stickiness called Embedded Analytics, in greater detail.
What is Embedded Analytics?
It is the merger of analytic capabilities and content in enterprise process applications. Through embedded analytics, brands provide analytical tools and relevant information that are designed for specific tasks at hand to help the users work smarter and with greater efficiency within the mobile applications they work around every day.
There are a number of benefits that come associated with the integration of Embedded Analytics, let us peruse them before moving to how they improve business strategy and drive revenue for your application.
Here are the benefits that Embedded Analytics offer to the world of both Enterprise apps and B2C apps:
Customer Benefits –
Embedding analytics in mobile application provides end users insights. Now-a-days, users want their apps to enable them to take better decisions and work smarter. When an app offers valuable analysis, users make them stickier, and a useful component of their everyday work life.
In B2B market: A task handling app help the end user analyze how they are spending their time in the office. With the help of embedded visualizations, the embedded analytics app offer understanding into how they can utilize their work time better. For example, through a simple chart inside the app, they can find out that they have been spending more than twice of their office time going through unproductive meetings.
In consumer market: A fitness app which inform someone of how many calories they have burned helps users plan their activities better. As the amount of collected data increases, the amount of app stickiness also increases. Users over time become less prone to switching to another fitness app as yours have information that is being collected for some time, an information that is useful for them.
In your business applications: The integrated dashboard which pulls in information from your CRM and ERP systems provides users with the information that they need to take quick decisions, without taking the efforts to indulge in multiple clicks. By providing teams with business intelligence analysis, you can help them informed, timely business decisions.
Business Benefits –
Today’s app businesses are continuously competing in a million similar category apps’ market. With this massive amount of availability, the end users end up having little to no patience for the apps that gives them zero value.
By giving the users real, lasting value through the embedded analytics, businesses are able to differentiate their app from rest of the many no value offering apps.
There are a number of ways Embedded Analytics Application help improve the business planning and operation workflow, when integrated right. Let us look at some of those ways –
Ways Embedded Analytics Improve Your Business Strategy
Secure environment, effective user experience – When we talk about analytics and data, a number of users have become habitual to relying on exclusive tools that are designed for concentrated business processes like the HR or CRM , or are dependent only on the applications, which just focus on analytics.
With the help of embedded analytics, the analysis and reporting functions happen in the known and trusted setup of primary business applications. Analytics, which can be seen as intimidating for the everyday users, when embedded in the ecosystem of an application help users understand them with greater ease, thus boosting their confidence in taking data driven decisions. Embedded analytics help create a seamless experience between the generation and the analysis of the crucial business data.
Greater Value of Invested time – It builds on the value that your current business application might be offering and brings a jump in the time that your users would be spending in your app.
Selecting the right application developers, who can seamlessly integrate embedded analytics in your app help promote a highly data-driven culture, while helping your team become more productive and efficient.
Makes BI omnipresent – For a number of organizations, BI is one platform or which is either managed by company’s IT department or is used by the management to plan and float business strategies. It is seen as that management-level function which seeps down through the company hierarchy a series of reports attached with actionable items.
Embedded analytics helps break down the walls to data, thus making BI omnipresent and getting the analysis and reporting parts of the business in the hand of everyone who uses that application. Instead of looking up to the IT team for a follow up on the view report request, users are able to get involved with the analysis process. Now that the analysis and data is accessible to everyone across the team, the decision making time reduces significantly.
Data-driven work culture – If there is one thing that organizations want, it is to make their employees capable of using data to then make critical decisions. Through embedded analytics, companies make data a crucial part of the processes and workflow teams are working around everyday.
Embedded analytics takes business intelligence to greater range of departments and business applications, while promoting commitment towards data and analysis, thus giving birth to a data-driven work culture.
Better Business Planning – It mixes analytics with business processes to power up users with informations that they need to handle the changing business environment. With your employees using the main business application boosted with analytics abilities, they will now react to opportunities and threats quicker while feeling confident in making informed business decisions.
Embedded analytics provides the ability to build reports and charts so that they can actively participate in business performance discussion, any time.
The various benefits that embedded analytics offer across businesses has led to an increase in its demand, to a huge extent.
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The rising demand for Embedded Analytics has prompted a number of mobile app development companies to build apps that bring the power of analytics into users’ hands. In a competitive scenario such as this, how do you ensure that your application’s analytics stand out, so much so that it earns revenue for you?
Here’s How –
How to drive revenue from your embedded analytics :
Here are the features that would make users spend money on your app’s embedded analytics:
Look into the complete user journey
The first step towards embedded analytics monetization starts with its seamless integration in the application. The integration should ensure that –
A. The reports and dashboards are a part of the app workflow and not in some separate tab and
B. They should follow the branding guidelines that the rest of the app is following.
Everything, straight from the color, icon, and the overlook and feel should be similar to what it is followed in the app.
Have Actionable Items in Your Applications Workflow
The embedded analytics that you have in your app should allow users to take some actions, instead of simply the View option, as commonly seen in analytics apps. Majority of the apps work as a one-way street, they give out information to the users to view and analyze but they don’t give them the freedom to even share the analytics with their colleagues.
Sharing the analytics is not the only way to set your app apart, by giving your users the access to edit and update the analytics on the application you can help them take action without leaving the platform.
To set yourself apart, it is important that you include actionable items in the app workflow.
Reduce Multiple Security Points
There are a number of embedded analytics applications that ask for a different login credential every time users wish to use the coveted analytics section.
In your app, aim for reducing the number of login points by allowing one-time sign-in and multi-tenancy features.
It will not just make it less cumbersome for the users, but the developers would also not have to integrate security level multiple times in the app.
Allow Customization of Analytics
Either one of these two situations happens when your users come to you for including a new dashboard according to some process they have recently started following in their team – Either the developers would have to change the core app functionality or they could refuse leaving a whole group of users dissatisfied.
By allowing users to customize the app as per their needs, the total number of total ad hoc analytics requests that your technology team receives reduces to a huge extent. The self-service analysis also gives you valuable insight about your customers, giving you an insight into the kind of reports and dashboard you should move next to fulfill the next set of customer needs.
Now that you have the understanding of how embedded analytics application benefits business processes and how you can drive it for generating revenue for your business, it is time to look into ways you can implement it in your application, for getting maximum output, with the help of one of the Top Android and iOS App Development Companies.
Tips for Successful Implementation of Embedded Analytics in Mobile App
1. Build in Phases
When you plan on integrating analytical capabilities in your mobile app, it is very easy to get carried away and miss out on the core problem and the set of users you visioned to help. But, before you even think about building solutions for a range of different teams, stop.
Start small. Begin working on the solution for one user, one problem, and one report. Collect feedback and then move forward to the next user, their problem, and the report to solve that problem.
Also, soon you will realize that as one problem get solved, users would require something else, so it’s best to follow Agile methodology for embedding analytics in the mobile application.
2. Involve both External and Internal Stakeholders
Keep external and internal stakeholders in your Agile loop. Keep taking continuous feedback from them as you develop the specific analytics features in your mobile application. Employ screen mockups since the very start of the process and keep reviewing them with your current customers to get validation for your process. Ask your stakeholders what they liked in the application, what they disliked how would they use it, and if they have any suggestions to improve the product.
Doing it will keep you focused on resolving real problems with the help of embedded analytics, and would make the users, app’s advocates as the solution becomes available for mass use.
3. Identify Gaps with Usability Study
As the users work around your embedded analytics solution, sit with them to learn how they are using the application and what issues they are facing, to identify the gaps. Look out for the issues that are bothering your users while they are inside the application and then let them find a solution, irrespective of how much time it would take, to know the route users would follow when they hit a wall within your app.
At every stage, ask questions that would get you maximum feedback. Push your users to rate the application’s features so that you have the priority workable item list ready with you.
So here was everything that you need to get started with embedded analytics integration in your mobile application. To understand the concept in greater detail, contact our team of experts.
While enterprises, today, still heavily rely on datacentre and single cloud infrastructures, technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are requiring applications and their data to be dispersed across multiple locations, including edge sites, multi-cloud and multi-datacentres. While this accounts for a small fraction of current usage, Gartner predicts that within five years, this will be the standard IT infrastructure for three-quarters of organisations.
The cloudification of edge computing
Edge computing is becoming increasingly important to enterprises that use IoT, ML and AI. Many of their technologies rely on the ability to process data locally so that real-time decision making can take place. The sheer volume of data these technologies use means sending everything to the cloud for processing would require unacceptable levels of latency.
That said, enterprises do want edge IT to operate in a similar fashion to the cloud. They want to be able to centrally manage operations rather than having local outposts undertake siloed management. For this, edge computing needs cloudification, the development of micro-clouds that enable organisations to deploy and connect an application and its infrastructure across a range of edge environments.
The cloudification of edge IT brings numerous benefits to enterprises. It brings edge sites global connectivity that is both secure and high-performance; it provides distributed edge sites with integrated storage, networking and compute resources; and it enables the business-wide management of distributed data and applications across its diverse infrastructure.
At the moment, edge cloudification is still in its infancy. However, new capabilities are constantly being developed and it is only a matter of time before cloud providers offer edge computing with a wide range of functionalities.
A different kind of multi-cloud
The way enterprises use different cloud services is about to change. At present, the term multi-cloud means that organisations have several cloud providers and, usually, each of these is used to run separate applications. It is a way of not keeping all your eggs in one basket and to defend against vendor lock-in.
In the future, this set-up will change to one which is significantly more modular and where different app components will be run in different cloud environments. This enables enterprises to carry out workloads where the unique qualities of each cloud environment and the expertise of the cloud provider are best matched to the needs of the task being run.
As a result, enterprises which adopt this methodology will be better placed to run and support more effective microservices. If today’s siloed approach is akin to a family buying all its food from a single supermarket and being limited to what was on the shelves there, the new way of approaching multi-cloud would let you buy your wines from a wine merchant, your meat from the farm shop and your pizzas from favourite Italian restaurant. If, for example, you ran an application that used both a database and machine learning, each of these two components could be run in the cloud environment that offered the best infrastructure and support.
At the same time, this multi-cloud approach also offers an added layer of availability protection. Should one of the cloud environments go offline, the application will still be available in the other so you can bring the affected component back online. For companies that need to keep the personal data of EU citizens stored on servers within the EU, this approach also helps with compliance, enabling data to be stored where it needs to be while other components can be run more effectively around the globe.
Distributed cloud and the future
At present, the move towards edge cloudification and the changing use of multi-cloud environments are separate advancements. However, they are both indicators of a growing trend towards the development of a distributed cloud. This new way of working is becoming increasingly necessary as it will enable enterprises to manage not only a wide variety of discrete components, e.g. edge applications, legacy datacentre apps and apps spread over multiple cloud providers; but crucially, the infrastructure required to support them. In doing so, it will operate as a unified distributed cloud where organisations can manage and operate their entire IT services. Indeed, it will enable applications to be deployed with common policies and provide global visibility across all locations and infrastructures.
Conclusion
The distributed cloud, essentially, is an approach that lets enterprises use the best tool for each job. It enables real-time processing to happen at the edge where decision making needs to be made quickly and enables app components to be run in the cloud environment where the infrastructure and support best fit. Crucially, however, it takes all these disparate elements and enables them to be centrally managed. If you are looking for bespoke, managed IT solutions, take a look at our Enterprise Hosting page.
Every time there is a mention of new technology, the first impression that is made on the non-technical population is that it is identically Magic. Enterprise applications are the same. People expect them to glide over in functions and perform flawlessly – like magic. But do they tend to this expectation as well as they can?
In the next 7 minutes, we will find out the answer to this question. But before we move over the deets of our magical expectations from enterprise apps and the reality of their working, we need to dig into the answers to What are Enterprise Apps and what is Enterprise App development?
What Are Enterprise Apps?
As per the definition from Techopedia, An enterprise application or EA is a specially designed (and large) software system platform that operates in a corporate environment like a local, state, or federal government body, a medium to large business, Schooling systems, or districts, non-profit groups, etc.
Though there is no defined set of properties that Enterprise apps or software should have, there are some characteristics that are found common across different enterprise applications, such as:
Central management
Scalability
Robustness
Business-orientation
Critical for the vision and mission of the enterprise
The built-in ability or communicate over interfaces of other enterprise software.
These characteristics are what make an Enterprise app better than normal applications. And As it can be made out that Enterprise app Development is becoming More evolved in order to become more collaborative and Agile.
Also, it has been made possible due to the prompt adoption of cloud-based technologies. IT sector around the globe is working in a collaborative way to build mobile applications with, both, internal business teams and external agencies that a company depends upon. With the availability of services and solutions through online mode, enterprise software development services in California or anywhere else focus on an approach to business transformation that puts people first.
And when we say “Enterprise App Development”, we are enclosing all the unique requirements there are in order to build an Enterprise app, such as:
Having multiple users with identical requirements that have to use the same app
A need for the said application to deliver value consistently and at scale.
Mammoth reserves of data to manage and integrate (sometimes at multiple levels).
Following all the above-mentioned conditions along with industry-specific guidelines and strict regulations, for instance, the Financial sector or healthcare.
Catering to Forever evolving and changing roles and responsibilities.
For all of these reasons combined, there is always a gap being created between what the customers expect and what is being delivered to them. And thus, Enterprise app development is a gargantuan task and people often fail to either understand the customer needs or to deliver them well. For a better understanding, let us take a trip of the user expectations from Enterprise apps.
How Enterprise App development should work?
An Enterprise App Development task is almost always taken upon by a well-managed enterprise mobile App Development company. And a team is designated for this purpose, wherein, everyone in the team has specific tasks to attend to. And thus, depending upon the role assigned to different people, they end up having a different vision about what the Enterprise mobile app development process should look like.
This is where the first loophole is created when the vision of the team is not aligned. Nevertheless, whether your role in the team is of a developer, tester, or deployer, there are some key values where we can linearly define our visions. So, in the end, we all want the process of Mobile Enterprise app development to be:
User-Focused:
This goes without saying that Enterprise App Development must be User-Centric. Every user expects the mobile apps (Enterprise Applications, here) to provide them with a high, consumer-grade user experience. And besides, the primary intention of all mobile app developers and designers to build applications that actually get used by as many people as possible and thus help both, their external and internal clients. Only then will they be able to meet their ultimate goals.
Highly secure:
Before the commencement of the Enterprise App development process, the primary question from the client’s side will be raised about the safety and security of the app or in other words, the security of their own data fed into the app. In the present world, the media reports are filled with the news of security breaches, even in the highest level of company software. In such scenarios, it is crucial for enterprise app developers to pay attention to safeguarding the valuable user data that is stored in the app.
Integration and connection:
The unique thing about Enterprises is that they use a number of software and applications that can be built independently as the need arises. But, it is one of the main requirements of enterprise app development that every new software or application must be able to seamlessly connect with all the existing data sources. This ensures better user experience and eliminates the extra work for software integrations.
Speed:
With the release plan of 5G technology in the world, it is only obvious that today, digital technology users give utmost priority to the high speed of networks and applications. Gone are the days when people were patient enough to watch their web pages load in the dial-up internet service. And besides, with the ever-rising backlog of data, the developers are more concerned with working on critical projects, rather than writing and rewriting front-end and back-end codes. After all, the business leaders require the updated technologies to be delivered to them as quickly as their business plans need change.
These four characteristics make up the foundation of an ideal enterprise app development process. But as we all can guess, the reality may not always align with our expectations of the ideal scenario. So, let us take a look at how the Enterprise app development actually works.
How Enterprise App development actually works?
There might be a few myths around Enterprise app development that are circling around the world, In all reality, there’s a diametrical difference between the ideal and the real scenario of Enterprise app development. Let us take a look at what the actual process goes like:
Project-Focused:
Even though all the developers and other people involved in Enterprise application development projects are well aware of the need that every app should be made keeping the end-user requirements in mind, too often, the teams working upon mobile app development for Enterprises with all the other enterprise mobility solutions, the reality-check says otherwise. In actuality, the apps are siloed and the enterprise ends up on multiple disengaged and stand-alone databases stored in different digital systems which are either impossible to integrate or are an extra burden for the enterprise’s IT team.
Slow:
Yes, even in today’s forever-rushing, technologically advanced world, custom enterprise application development is a tough task. Hence the project of enterprise app development ends up taking longer than contracted. Somehow, there are never enough man-hours available for timely delivery.
But of course, the blame can not be put on the app development team alone. Enterprise app development is a big task and there are significant challenges attached to it.
Key challenges in Enterprise application development:
Data Encryption:
One of the biggest challenges faced in enterprise application development is the proper and secure encryption of sensitive data stored on smartphones. And as mLearning is getting more and more popular at workplaces, the concept of BYOD (Bring your own device) is making it more difficult for app developers to keep the data encrypted. Nevertheless, encryption and secure containment of data are crucial for enterprise app development because they can save the data from leakage in case of device theft.
Access to data:
Mobile applications for enterprises have a number of challenges that are faced by developers at different degrees. One of the most crucial and common problems is offline access to data. This has become one of the biggest challenges that are faced by mobile app development companies, especially in big enterprises that see a need for urgent access to data even when there is no connection to any online portal.
Device Fragmentation – BYOD
BYOD is sure the talk of the town but it has shown an equal amount of challenge to the developers. With the rise in “bring your own device” policies across multiple enterprises, mobile app developers are facing the challenge of accommodating a plethora of mobile devices in their enterprise applications. Previously, developers had to focus on only a few kinds of operating systems and mobile devices which is not the case with BYOD. This scenario has given rise to the challenge of device fragmentation because of the adoption of “one size fits all” technique for the development of Enterprise mobility solutions.
There are numerous ways to increase the chances of your enterprise app failure, But the good thing is that every challenge has a solution. It might not be the best solution but it can substantially decrease the problem that was being faced initially so as to make matters simpler. For instance, we, at Anteelo, ensure that these issues don’t show up in your enterprise app dev.
Overcoming the Challenges in Enterprise App development
There is a major requirement of a strong defense system in place for all the digital devices that comprises data encryption, firewalls for individual applications, and at the host and network levels.
Since the data stored in an enterprise mobile app is highly crucial to the enterprise. Therefore, the use of competent security software in place to make the data security is required. Along with other data, the privacy of sensitive user data and information is to be protected.
Web applications and mobile applications which are cloud-based are highly prone to cyber-attacks. Therefore, in order to safeguard the data of this software, the security software must be competent and updated which the latest security patches.
Application vulnerability tests must be held on a periodic basis.
The environment that includes multiple systems must ensure careful designing keeping in mind the diversity of devices.
To avoid the problem of device fragmentation, developers must recognize the most common digital system or device in order to make the enterprise mobile app compatible with a maximum of devices.
A smart link can be established between applications that are using a similar set of data in order to achieve optimization.
Of course, there is a gap being created in the enterprise app development process. The reality of the scenario is much different from the one we expect in reality. However, every loophole can be fixed with careful operations and systems in place. Hence, it is safe to say that even though there is a gap in the app development process, there is enough room for improvement as well.
We, at Anteelo, as an Enterprise mobile app development company are working towards a standardized procedure to minimise all the possible gap in these processes. But, the roadmap to being a successful app startup company consists of more than just following the SOP.
And we all are aware that the enterprise software development services in California and around the world have created some very intricate and reliable mobile applications for big enterprises which can only be cited as a development in the course if nothing else.
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