[Blog Post] Born mobile generation invading today’s enterprise

A new generation is born and they are mobile. Born mobile generation is not related to a particular age, it’s a new generation who are exploring whole new possibilities with the explosive growth of smart mobile devices. Every generation is now born mobile unleashing the power of mobile. Today’s enterprise is already attracting so many smart mobile devices from employees, suppliers, partners & customers who belong to born mobile generation. In the future every single individual around an enterprise will be equipped with a smart mobile device thus becoming born mobile.

Smart mobile devices unleash immense possibilities of how we work & engage around an enterprise. Mobile technology is becoming one of the biggest focus areas in the enterprise today. The question is, Are we ready for this paradigm shift?

Enterprises that are in the cusp of realizing the immense potential with mobility will encounter number of challenges in this journey. To overcome these challenges there is an opportunity to deliver standards based comprehensive enterprise mobility platform.

To explore some of these challenges, let’s begin with the influx of smart mobile devices into an enterprise triggering the adoption of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.

Today, customers, partners, suppliers & employees have access to the latest smart mobile devices. They all want to use their personal devices when engaging with the company, triggering many challenges from security, provisioning, governance and even monitoring these devices. Not to mention the challenges that will appear around the numerous apps & data consumed by these user groups for various business tasks. In order to overcome these challenges a strong mobile device management platform is essential for today’s mobile enterprise. A solid MDM platform will provide required functionality for an enterprise to securely provision, govern and monitor variety of mobile devices across different platforms within an organization. MDM platforms help organizations manage associated business risks, reduce support costs and the successful implementation of managed BYOD policies.

The next challenge is to change your business processes & aligning them towards mobile, to realize it’s full potential. Today’s organizations need to completely rethink their business processes to support mobility. Applications need to be engineered to suit mobile devices. They also need to be in par with consumer app experience to avoid rejection from a variety of user groups around an enterprise. However, building, managing and provisioning mobile applications within an organization is quite a challenging affair. You have to deal with a number of hurdles, which includes, supporting different mobile platforms & form factors, connecting with variety of backend data sources & service elements, delivering the apps relevant to different user groups etc.

To address these challenges enterprises needs to explore adoption of a Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). A solid MEAP stack will offer required capabilities for cross platform application development, development life cycle management, full featured enterprise app store, and backend integration to variety of data stores & services.

One of the key challenges to instigate, is the building of enterprise apps, which has the capability to work across different O/S platforms. The rapid evolution of HTML5, exposing enterprise API’s, native mobile O/S platform plug-ins all integrated into a seamless development platform provides enterprises the ability to quickly build enterprise ready mobile apps. In this process a life cycle management tool can play a significant role to ease the complexity of managing the different stages of the life cycle. A totally integrated app lifecycle platform can ease the burden involved in building, testing, quality assurance and live production of enterprise mobile apps.

Furthermore, the complexities arising from app distribution can be reduced with a seamlessly integrated enterprise app store that is allows users to discover apps based on their identity credentials.

An enterprise app store will provide all user groups the required capabilities to experience features similar to a public app store. Some of the key features available similar to a public store will include easy discovery of apps, download, install, update, ratings & feedbacks. Ratings & feedbacks will help improve quality of apps offered by an enterprise, thus driving the development of superior apps for enterprise use. It will also increase competition between development teams & app vendors to produce better quality apps. An enterprise app store integrated with mobile device management (MDM) makes app provisioning, management & governance within an enterprise a much more simpler affair.

In conclusion, mobile device management & mobile enterprise application platforms provides the required tools to effectively manage the complexities around mobility and transforming the organization into a successful mobile enterprise. The explosive growth of smart mobile device adoption & mobile apps will continuously increase pressure on today’s enterprises to rethink their present IT strategy in order to embrace this paradigm shift.

For today’s enterprises there is very little choice! Working with the born mobile generation and rapidly moving towards building an inclusive mobile enterprise has become an absolute must.