CIOs are under pressure to deliver business capabilities on mobile devices, all while optimizing budgets, increasing operational excellence, and providing innovative, secure solutions. It’s a complex juggling act.

In the mobile space, it’s tempting to just jump in and start building mobile apps. But corporate IT needs to help balance the exuberance of building apps with using a common set of success criteria. This is especially true if the enterprise wants a manageable and successful mobile app effort, defined by usage, adoption and business value. 

While corporate IT can provide technical design and architecture expertise, even more important is the role they play in terms of coordinating the enterprise mobile app strategy. Here are six key steps for doing so:

1. Create a cross-functional "mobile app working team"

This is a group of business and IT team members that are passionate about creating mobile solutions and are able to represent the needs and priorities of their functions (such as marketing, sales, support, etc.). This “working team” determines the mobile app roadmap, meets monthly to align mobile app efforts across the enterprise, and agrees to standards in mobile app design and development.

2.    Agree on key mobile app principles

I strongly recommend leveraging the mobile app working team to articulate and agree to the following items for your organization:

• UI/UX Standards – Agree that everyone will follow the same mobile app design, style-guide and branding guidelines (as typically defined by marketing). This will help create a unified experience. Consistent UI/UX standards positively affect your customer experience. Hire a UX expert who can be 100% dedicated to the mobile app experience.

• Native vs. Hybrid Apps – Determine and agree on a decision making framework around native vs. hybrid apps. Avoid a religious battle by using a fact-based set of guidelines to determine which to build, typically on a case-by-case basis.

• Security – Determine the security framework for mobile apps. A member of your security team should be part of the working team and should provide the security requirements for mobile apps. Embed security for mobile apps into your development cycle and discuss the level of access control granularity needed. Most important is understanding what data is captured, where data is stored and how data is encrypted.

• Integration - Determine the integration requirements for your mobile apps. For example, whether the apps need access to your master data, to your transactional data or to other systems. Articulate a mobile app integration framework with a set of integration standards. Common integration services are your friend.

• Mobile App Development - Decide who will build mobile apps. For example, will development be centralized or distributed? Determine how development standards and code reviews will be implemented, and what happens if an app doesn’t follow standards. If a third party is developing apps for you, choose where the source code will be secured and maintained so that you have the ability to manage and extend the code in the future.

3. Choose mobile app support and maintenance

Focus on the end-to-end lifecycle of your mobile apps. Especially important is determining who will support, maintain, and extend your mobile apps after they launch. It’s always fun to build mobile apps but not always so fun to support them.

4. Build and reuse common mobile app services

Focus on leveraging a common access control capability, a common logging capability, and a common alerts/notifications framework. Ensure that your new apps leverage these frameworks as a way to improve quality but also accelerate delivery of your mobile apps.

5. Assume success and failure

Some apps will succeed in terms of garnering adoption and some will not. The beauty of mobile apps is that you should be able to “try things out” quickly and easily. Think big, start small, and move fast.

6. Innovate

Get people involved and engaged in your mobile app strategy. Coordinate a “mobile app hackathon” which allows everyone the opportunity to invent new ways of solving problems. You will be amazed at the great app ideas that come from a hackathon. Especially important is to have business function team members and IT team members at the hackathon to enhance your real objective which is innovation and step-function business value.

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