According to R “Ray” Wang, “Mobile is a key entry point into digital transformation and digital business initiatives,” and he’s right, of course. But since every business is a little bit different, everyone is looking for different things.
In a recent blog post on the softwareinsider.org website R “Ray” Wang looked at some of the things that businesses are looking for in mobile. As Ray states, “Along with cloud, social, big data/analytics, and video, mobile is one of the five pillars of digital. Mobile is more than the first screen of interaction for many users. Mobile describes how users expect to access and engage.”
Ray contends that new patterns of mobile usage have changed the way that organizations are looking at developing for mobile. He lists seven key things businesses want from mobile and the list is interesting.
The first thing businesses want is the fulfillment of an age old promise: Write once and really deploy everywhere. Ray says, “Users expect responsive design, yet they also expect access to native device features. The inefficiency of supporting multiple platforms, channels, and interfaces inhibits rapid design and deployment. Expect mobile development and cloud computing to go hand in hand.”
Another key point is centralized security management. “Developers prefer to embed security policies and device management at design instead of deploying security policies for every operating system, device, and application combination,” Ray says.
Other points include support for BYOD policies without customization, the ability to manage upgrades easily, and to allow for agile development methodologies.
The list also includes the ability to deliver context in right time not just real time. “Users expect context drivers such as roles, relationship, time, location, sentiment, and intent to carry seamlessly across all business processes and journey maps. Delivering context at scale requires a process point of view,” says Ray.
And of course there are the new buzzwords of the day – wearables and support for the Internet of Things. “Requirements must support new data and sensor capture requirements. Online and offline support for access to information power future big data business models.”
Ray suggests taking a mobile first approach (if you want to satisfy the seven requirements). “Mobile first is more than a mantra. Why? By applying design thinking to solving specific and purposeful tasks and processes, organizations can rethink the digital journey with mobile projects. More importantly, mobile enables organizations to break the silos of existing systems from mainframes to on-premises systems and bring new life to legacy applications usage,” he writes.
We tend to agree with Ray on these points (although simply adopting a mobile first attitude isn’t necessarily going to address each of Ray’s points).
If you would like to read Ray’s post you can find it here.
