Mowbly Blog Does Your Enterprise have a Mobility Strategy? - Part 5/6

This is the part five in this series which discusses the misconceptions enterprises have in embarking on a mobility strategy.#13 Squeezing legacy devices into mobility strategyEnterprises of certain domains say for example, logistics where field service plays a major role in the business, might have a substantial investment done in legacy mobile devices, if they have been in the market for a long while. Typically these enterprises try to extend their investment on legacy devices to their current enterprise mobility strategy along with the smartphones and tablets, which is quite valid from business point of view.But it happens at times that the seriousness of the constraints these legacy devices put on your mobility strategy go unnoticed. Implementation of such a dual strategy is doomed to fail considering the wider spectrum of devices to support with profound difference in their capabilities. The more ideal way is to manage them as separate strategies and eventually phase out the legacy devices support.Hence, it makes a greater sense to decouple the legacy devices from mainstream mobility strategy to ensure success in long run.#14 Shying away from investing in a mobility platformEnterprise mobility is much more than just building apps. The ecosystem of enterprise mobility involves multiple stakeholders - developers, IT admin and end users. A proper implementation of enterprise mobility should ensure greater adoption of all these stakeholders. Typical requirement of the users are,Developers need a robust and flexible environment to build and test apps for a variety of devices.IT admin needs complete freedom and control on the mobility deployment. Seamless deployment of mobile apps coupled with security and management are mandatory.End users like seamless consumption of apps, greater app experience and a non-intrusive securityGoing by the traditional way of building point based solutions will not address these requirements and hence is a sure path to failure of your strategy. The right approach is to choose a Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) that offers you a complete system helping you in development, deployment, management and monitoring of your mobile apps. Hence for an effective mobility strategy investment in a mobility platform is the key. Have you enterprise done it?Related: 15 points to look for when choosing an enterprise mobility platform#15 Dependency on software application vendorsA typical enterprise IT landscape would consist of business software ranging from legacy systems to the latest web based solutions. Enterprise mobility strategy would need mobile apps across these software and systems. As explained in the Fragmented Apps section earlier in this white paper, enterprises would want to leverage the mobility offering of these software from their vendors.However, not every system is capable of being extended to mobile devices and even in possible cases, the mobility road map of the vendor would not align with yours. If your enterprise has such an IT landscape, which is very common, it is best to refrain from depending on the application vendors for your mobility strategy. Rather, if possible, your enterprise must demand the vendors for service interfaces for their applications which can be used in the mobile apps to integrate back with them. Enterprises might also need to possibly work on parallel systems to extend legacy software onto mobility, like building abstraction layers or web enabling them.Waiting on the application vendors for your enterprise mobility strategy is a bad sign and you may not want to be blocked by a couple of software whose vendors have no plans to migrated them to smartphones or tablets.Stay tuned for the last part in this series.