Yankee Group recently released their report “2014 Predictions: Mobility Hits a Tipping Point as Markets Consolidate, Players Build Out Capabilities.” The report covers many different areas such as mobile point-of-sale (mPOS), machine to machine (M2M), customer experience and mobile video. Unsurprisingly, the report stresses the importance of finding a strategic platform partner. This is crucial because we don’t want our application maintenance staff to be tasked with maintaining skills for multiple, incompatible platforms. What some may find surprising are the details of why Yankee Group feels this is important:
Look for a strategic mobile application platform partner that has a future-oriented roadmap that will provide extensibility (think 100s or 1,000s, not single-digit applications), scalability (rapidly from a few to potentially millions of customers and back down again) and flexibility (prioritizing open-source standards and some degree of agnosticism to tools, standards and infrastructures).
This one sentence includes many important themes.
Extensibility
Hundreds or thousands of applications. If all you needed was a single application, you could source that from the vendor of your customer relationship management (CRM) or appointment booking or core banking systems. But we need to acknowledge that each of our organizations will need several different applications, which will serve different parts of our enterprise. The apps that our field workers need are very different from the app that a manager needs. Clients want to check the status of an order, while our vendors need visibility into the purchase order approval system.
We need to ensure that we have infrastructure that will make creating and maintaining these apps as easy and smooth as possible. Pioneers of mobile 10 years ago built mobile applications that were device-specific and difficult to enhance and extend. Today many of those pioneers are searching the Internet for spare parts for those devices while they formulate a new forward-looking, device-agnostic strategy. IBM Worklight provides organizations with a future-oriented platform that will enable you to adjust to the changes in the mobile device landscape while preserving the investment you have made in your infrastructure.
Scalability
Mobile is driving an increase in the number of people who are accessing data and processes from our deepest internal systems. In the old days, only bank tellers had access to terminals that could check a client’s account. Only travel agents had access to global distribution systems (GDS) that could check flight schedules and ticket prices. As these systems were exposed to a wider group of users, companies needed to ensure that the systems were scalable through stress testing and secure through penetration testing. Mobile is taking this to a new level.
Today we don’t need to wait until our friends and family arrive home to login and check train schedules. When a friend tells us about a new book he read we can reach for our phone and buy it on the spot. Managers can approve vacation requests while taking a taxi between meetings or sitting on a plane waiting to take off.
These additional transactions require that our core systems can scale to meet the new demand. Mobile experiences are expected to be smooth. We need to ensure that we are testing our apps in the same way that we have tested our legacy applications and our web applications. We need to ensure that we can scale systems to meet requests and scale our testing to ensure that we can test new functionality, new applications and enhanced versions of existing applications.
How can we scale our testing to accommodate hundreds of applications on three, four or five different platforms? Worklight customers have access to IBM Mobile Test Workbench for Worklight (MTWW) at no extra charge. This provides application testers with the ability to record a test, generate a human-readable script and then automate running that functional test for different devices. When you are ready to test performance and core application services you can add IBM Rational Test Workbench and ensure that your app will continue to function smoothly as the popularity and value of your application exceeds your wildest expectations.
Flexibility
An organization I’m working with is starting its mobile journey by creating an app for managers to process approvals. Some of the approvals mobile-enable SAP back-office processes and facilitate approving vacation requests. Other approvals have to do with accounts payable and require being able to access documents stored in a Microsoft SharePoint repository. While the app will be a single app, it is important that the mobile platform chosen, Worklight, is able to easily connect to a variety of core applications in order to expose the processes and data to the mobile users. Had the organization chosen a mobile platform from one of the vendors of their vertical core applications they would have found it difficult to leverage information and processes from the other systems.
Some forward-thinking organizations are looking to a future where they won’t control all of the applications that will leverage their core legacy systems. They foresee a future where partners will build mobile applications that will leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) that they have exposed. By adopting IBM API Management they are able to control who has access to the APIs and ensure that their core systems are secure and not being compromised.
I suggest you download and read the full Yankee Group report. Are you envisioning a future where your organization will have hundreds and thousands of apps? What is the business value you anticipate from these apps? Why multiple apps and not just one? Let’s have a discussion on this topic in the comments below or connect with me, @davidleeheyman, on Twitter and let’s talk about your plans and ideas.
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