This blog post’s title says it all. There is a gap between businesses’ ability to build business mobile apps in a timely manner and their recognition of the significance of business mobile apps to their long-term success in enterprise mobility. We came across an excellent article on the problem at Enterprise Efficiency titled “The Enterprise Mobility Disconnect” that is definitely worth reading. We wrote a response to the article which is reproduced below. We hope it is helpful to you. Response to “The Enterprise Mobility Disconnect”
Based on countless discussions with enterprises, we are convinced that companies are increasingly recognizing that in order to stay competitive they have to come up with a coherent plan for building business mobile apps, or extending their existing apps to take advantage of mobile. Problem arise, however, when it gets to the realities of implementation. A few observations are as follows: Nowadays, building business apps is more difficult than it was in the past because they typically need to work on both the web and all of the major mobile devices (Apple, Android, and increasingly Microsoft). Apps must also be optimized for each device and support a novel, animated, and touch-oriented user experience. See Alpha CTO Dan Bricklin’s recent article on Responsive App Design.
For implementation, you can have multiple teams building for each target platform/device but that is frightfully expensive, and you run up against the reality of a profound skill shortage in the mobile developer area. Check out this data from the Robert Half Organization on the topic of mobile skills shortages.
Or, you can adopt an HTML5 approach for building your enterprise mobile apps. Even though this is a less expensive and much more practical approach in a multi-platform/BYOD world, it still requires developers with “full stack” skills (server, database, server-side programming, HTML5, JavaScript, CSS3).
When you think about it, that’s asking a lot of a developer! Additionally, once more, you encounter the aforementioned skill shortage issue head-on. How to leverage existing development staff in building enterprise level business mobile apps
Clearly, what is needed are better development and deployment environments that allow companies to transform their existing development staff and domain experts into effective mobile developers. Once this happens, then it becomes realistic for companies to get serious about implementing their mobile plans. Well, it has happened, in the form of Alpha Anywhere. If you haven’t downloaded, please do so at www.alphasoftware.com and see for yourself!
