For nine days, Pyxis Mobile's Mobile Productivity Blog will be publishing a series of articles providing the case for enterprise mobility, along with the technical considerations and evaluation criteria for selecting a mobile partner.
As you answer the questions mentioned in the last chapter, you’ll gain an understanding of what type of solution is right for your organization, and must then decide whether to buy a packaged mobile application or build a proprietary solution from scratch. At first glance, developing and deploying a solution in house seems like the logical choice. After all, a custom build allows organizations to design to their own unique workflow needs, security requirements, corporate standards, and to the demands of specific user groups. It is, in the eyes of many companies, a way to control their own mobility destiny. Sounds good, right?
We’re going to bring you back down to reality. Building a solution from scratch is a major undertaking for which most organizations have the ability but not necessarily the resources. Custom development requires a large in-house team that includes engineers, a project manager, QA staff, and a UI lead. For many companies, assembling this team often means pulling employees off projects that are more critical to core business operations. Development teams become quickly overwhelmed as they come to terms with the sheer scope of what it takes to build and deploy an effective enterprise wide mobility solution: creating unique applications for each user group, and testing them to ensure they will work on the more than 10 mobile operating systems and hundreds of different devices currently on the market.
Once companies have deployed their custom solutions, they alone are responsible for maintenance and updates, draining yet more resources from other areas of their business. According to a report from Gartner, device, platform, and application diversity will continue to grow in the smartphone category, and by some estimates the number of mobile application tools and platforms being used by enterprises will jump by 30-percent by 2011. With the top four mobile operating systems each holding a market share of more than ten percent, and device makers introducing on average over 20 new Windows Mobile devices, three BlackBerry models and one iPhone as well as two new operating systems each year, it’s highly unlikely that there will be market convergence around a single operating system or device family in the foreseeable future. And according to an article in SearchMobileComputing.com entitled “Employees using their own mobile devices are a growing challenge,” Forrester found that over 40 percent of employees are using their own smartphones to search the internet or a corporate intranet for work-related tasks, further stretching organizations as they struggle to support their mobile workforces.
“Once consumers have a taste of constant connectivity it is extremely difficult to do without it.” - Ockham Research, Seeking Alpha
Question: How is your company going to deal with the connectivity addiction? Come back for our next chapter where we’ll delve into the numbers behind an enterprise mobility solution.
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