Simplifying the Development and Publishing of Apps for Businesses Today

Featured article by Stuart Mason, CEO, 5app

As digitization and mobility in companies become all pervasive, and IT departments continue to strive to do more with less, the shortage of IT skills to support Mobile Apps development and publishing is an increasingly acute issue.

In 2011, Gartner predicted that by 2014, at least 25% of enterprise applications would be built by ‘citizen developers’ – defined as an end user who builds applications for consumption by themselves and their peers using company sanctioned resources.

In the event, we are seeing a surprisingly large percentage of the 18-30 demographic finding their own ways to source or develop mobile apps to help them do their jobs – often unwittingly putting company data or compliance at risk.

Vendors are profiting by circumventing the IT department to sell to these end users direct as there is now IT budget in every budget. This is giving rise to drag and drop tools which are being aimed at those employees with business domain knowledge but no coding or IT process skills.

Practical and measured steps by the IT Manager to simplify the development and publishing of apps can provide immediate relief from mobile app development skills shortages. Simplification will also reduce company data risks, accelerate Time to Develop, and make it easier to engage with end users and furnish them with a curated app store.

A further consequence of removing the complexity from app development and publishing is that it frees up time for the existing team to innovate with the business. As one CTO of a mid-sized law firm said recently: “the typical requirement I see is a user saying ‘wouldn’t it be good if we could do this on the move’.” Existing teams are so busy fighting fires that they don’t usually have time to respond to investigate these requirements.

Creating, developing, publishing and maintaining a typical enterprise app designed to work on multiple operating systems will involve a number of steps with varying levels of complexity, such as:

• * Understanding the business need
• * Defining what the application must do
• * Designing the user interfaces and technical requirements
• * Designing and potentially modifying back-end APIs for data transfer
• * Integrating a security model
• * Functional and non-functional requirements
• * Designing the graphic look and feel, including user interface and user experience
• * Choosing the target operating systems and devices
• * Enabling the required development environments, testing and tools
• * The Application Deployment, and how that will be managed
• * Setting up a maintenance program to keep the application current with devices and updated operating platforms

Within this non-exhaustive list, today’s model is inherently manual and depends on a collection of skills within the business.

The challenge for a business is to simplify the development and deployment of Mobile apps by selectively automating the more complex work involved in certain steps, so that existing resources can use their existing skills to do the work.

Suggested steps to focus on include:

1. Methods that help the business define what they want in a clear and simplified way, e.g. Rapid prototyping

2. A development environment and infrastructure that handles the more complex steps during multi-platform development with open source tools like Cordova;  as well as handling authentication, push, and store-forward-synchronisation

3. The deployment of the apps and how that is managed. This is both dependent on technical skills, as well as knowledge of publishing processes to deliver a completed application to groups across the enterprise

There is a perplexing continuum of products on the market to help with these steps.

At the recent Enterprise Apps World in London, it was a common grumble for a lot of companies that they are finding many of these tools too expensive however, and that they are not using all of the features that they are paying for.

A final thought.

Unchecked, the proliferation of available apps will dilute the value to a business because data, information and interactive services will become increasingly fragmented, and unreliable.

Acting now to curate those apps while still at manageable levels, and provide an enterprise app store to give your employees all the apps they need in one easy to find place is the proverbial stitch in time.

Stuart Mason is CEO of 5app, a mobile enterprise enablement company working with businesses and communications service providers to provide enterprise-class support for mobile data and applications. Headquartered in London, 5app recently launched an enterprise app store and DIY app builder service for businesses.