The Top 5 Mobility Challenges Your Enterprise Faces

What are the biggest mobility challenges you face in your enterprise’s move to a mobile world? You may not even realize what they are, which could be your biggest challenge. A whitepaper from Appdome, “The top 5 enterprise mobility challenges,” outlines them well. Following are the paper’s highlights.

Challenge Number 1: SDK Fatigue

SDKs are designed to make life easier for developers. With them, you should be able to easily incorporate features, capabilities, and links to data sources into your mobile app with a minimum of effort. In theory, that’s true. In practice, though, it’s not. As the white paper notes, “In the rapidly evolving mobile world, there is increasingly an SDK for everything. SDKs pile up. They change fast, just as fast as the OS and the app itself.” That can make life tougher, not easier. So developers need to balance the need for SDKs with the amount of work each one requires.

Challenge Number 2: Mobile Application Reach

Enterprises have to build many mobile apps, and then need to manage and update them all. It’s hard enough doing that for one platform. But when you develop each app for multiple platforms you’ve got a major headache on your hands. The whitepaper’s advice: “Vendors that present new ways of reaching more apps with existing mobility investments should be strongly preferred so you can get the most out of your chosen enterprise mobility platform.”

Challenge Number 3: One-Off Implementations

Often, every mobile app a developer writes for an enterprise becomes a world unto itself, requiring hand-tooling and extra work — and that’s just to get the app launched. Having to manage and update each of them makes life even more difficult. When this happens, the whitepaper warns, “Very quickly, organizations realize that they are behind in delivering even the single app their users need.” So developers need to balance the needs of the entire enterprise against the features of any individual mobile app.

Challenge Number 4: Going Without Apps or Security for Apps

Security is a big issue with building enterprise mobile apps, so much so that some companies ban or limit the use of them in the workplace. Others allow only a subset of the app to be used, and still, others let apps go unprotected. As a result, the whitepaper warns, “Allowing one app, or one use-case to fall outside of corporate policies quickly becomes the rule.” It goes on to advise: “Organizations should avoid the slippery slope that place broader enterprise mobility strategies at risk. Instead, they should find a better way to secure and manage every app the organization and users need.”

Challenge Number 5: Maintaining a Broad(er) Mobility Vision

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds when building enterprise mobile apps and forget the big picture. You need to step back once in a while, and “Prioritize development efforts to focus on mobile projects that deliver business and customer value first.” The report concludes: “Each hour spent on manual implementations can’t be used on new mobile projects and new apps that address new audiences, new use cases and new mobile objectives.”