TCO & The 4 Factors of Mobile App Development Part 2 - Thinking Long Term

Thinking long-term about continued support, upgrades and administration of applications:

In our last blog, we talked about the hurdles of developing for multiple device types. Today we will discuss another issue that adds complexity to the mobile application development process: projecting costs over time.

There are two issues that make it difficult to project support and administration costs over a 2-5 year time frame or longer:

1. the pace of innovation in mobile technology

2. the increasing demand for mobile applications

Mobile technologies evolve so rapidly that the devices and operating systems used in the field today will be obsolete in no time. So companies need to continually upgrade their mobile applications to ensure compatibility with new hardware and OS versions. As the evolution of mobile technology continues and expands, demand increases accordingly because everyone wants simplicity in their life and mobility is a way to deliver it.

These groups of people who are demanding access to mobile technologies are referred to as new user groups, and as they emerge companies are increasingly pressured to develop applications to meet their specific informational and functional needs.

We typically segment users into three categories for the corporate enterprise:

• employees
• strategic business partners
• customers

Continued support, upgrades, and development costs of a mobile application are unavoidable and should be considered up front. If a company develops several applications for multiple device types, stand alone solutions may end up costing more while providing less functionality and flexibility than a mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP). Regardless of the final approach a company takes, creating a mobile strategy that takes into account technological evolution, time frame, future market demand and emerging user groups offers many benefits.

According to Gartner, "these organizations can increase effectiveness as well as save, on average, about 12% on TCO by applying closer scrutiny of choices ranging from the degree of SFA application integration, mobile architecture, software procurement and/or development, battery life, network coverage, user interface design, and application-specific end-user support."

Has your company faced this challenge? Have you created an app for iPhone that you had to build again for BlackBerry or Android? Are you finding it costly or resource-intensive to upgrade your applications? Tell us about it!

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