Key Challenges in Enterprise Mobile App Development: Employee-Facing Apps

Business owners must possess an ability to understand where their customers are and how effectively should they engage with them. Any business looks for three primary things in a mobile app: How do they increase their sales, how should they increase efficiency and how should they build a loyal customer base? Entrepreneurs are a special breed that works for hours that regular people would balk at, investing all of their resources into their vision, their dream and always looking for ways to improve. Small business owners are normally into all of these practices. Businesses can do a variety of things via mobile applications – access information, play games, do banking, monitor their homes, communicate and interact with local businesses.

What happens when Enterprise Mobile Applications come into the scene?

Enterprise apps face the enterprise and are concerned around the field workers, as opposed to externally facing apps (like rental apps). Enterprise apps increase worker productivity, leverage big data, and help optimize business process efficiency.

Enterprises get to build mobile apps for these primary reasons:

• Enterprise apps increase overall corporate productivity
• Such apps empower field workers who often get to change the nature of corporate landscapes with their adoption of smart devices like tablets.

Enterprise mobility is a must-have for any competitive business these days. The reason is due to the huge possibility of future gains in worker productivity. Mobility results in (1) increased throughput or increased sales (2) requirement of less stock or inventory, and (iii) fewer operational expenses. Moreover, these efficiencies are realized by pairing mobile apps with data analytics.

Biggest app development companies have started making use of smart devices giving real-time insights about the processes to workers. This often gives them the ability to feed first-hand data from the ground back to the enterprise in a recursive cycle that results in data being analyzed instantaneously and then re-fed in the form of business intelligence to those workers’ devices.

Applications to be used in Enterprises are big. They are not gaming apps like Angry Birds, Pokemon Go or Candy Crush. Besides these, there are some non-enterprise applications of medium complexity and size that have gradually graduated into some form of enterprise usage (such as Twitter, Skype, and Facebook), which are now being used for commercial purposes.

A lot of unstructured data is generated. And it has not been analyzed yet. Deep learning can effectually change this scenario. Analysis of big data is not easy and it is simultaneously not easy to gain market share at a lower cost. It seems as difficult before actual implementation, but there are quite a few firms into predictive analytics that lure enterprise attention.

Big data is about business and not just about the extensive/unstructured data. Analytics-based and data-infused business intelligence informs enterprises of marketing opportunities or inefficiencies that can be addressed.

Major Mobile App Challenges Faced By Enterprise Apps

Complex enterprise-grade solutions are developed due to increasing requirements. But the factors that affect the development strategy:

• Changing business requirements: Ever-changing client’s requirements and technological innovations might create an issue for app development companies in creating huge enterprise applications.
• Web to Mobile: Shifting to the mobile application platform can be hectic.
• Restricted Access: Restricting the application access to only a few users can be an issue as securing the resources of the application like user-interface services, Operating System services, Business Process Services can be complex.
• Scattered and Unorganized Data: Scattered and Unorganized data is difficult to tame.
• Future Proof: The idea to make future proof enterprise applications needs reinventing the wheel. Inclusion of big technologies like block-chain, artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality might require organizations to change make changes to their processes and adapt to the client’s requirements.
• Interoperability: Linking of various sub-systems within an enterprise to achieve optimization in Enterprise Application can be an issue.
• Experience and user interface: Functionality can impact coordination with user-interface and user-experience to achieve desirable navigation, accessibility, employee satisfaction, and productivity.
• Costly: Enterprise Application development can be costly, might need expertise and detailed planning.
• Developing and integrating various systems might take time: Cost and time required to develop enterprise applications, implementation of a modular approach and ready-made functionalities customized according to the needs of the organization
• Maintainability: Maintaining such a huge system isn’t easy.
• Scalability: Organizations need to improve upon their services with the help of innovative approaches. When they need to expand, hire more people, manufacture new products, produce more information, they also need to scale up their organization and the software they use. Enterprise app development companies need to accommodate themselves according to the new market besides being flexible in their approach.
• Distribution: Distributing hardware and delegating responsibilities can often become a problem in growing enterprises.
• Legacy Software: Integrating legacy systems that are created with very few initial requirements along with other existing systems is difficult.
• Diverse Vendors: It is difficult to manage various business processes via different software produced by different vendors. While Microsoft CMS might be used to organize the documentation workflow, human resources will have to be handled via different software.

Lastly

The solution has to be built specifically around verticals. The developer has to have a deep understanding of the client’s requirements. The expectations from an Enterprise Application vary according to the need and size of the business. It navigates from the smooth integration of constituent systems to adaptability to changing business and technology environments. Enterprise Applications save numerous hours from getting wasted on untangling malfunctioned cross-links between various sub-systems. It is always advised to check the efficiency of the Enterprise Application in achieving the main goal.