Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

Maximize the value of your mobile investments by prioritizing technology decisions on user experience, business priorities, and system quality.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Mobile is the way of working.

Workers require access to enterprise products, data, and services anywhere at anytime on any device. Give them the device-specific features, offline access, desktop-like interfaces, and automation capabilities they need to be productive.

To be successful, you need to instill a collaborative business-IT partnership. Only through this partnership will you be able to select the right mobile platform and tools to balance desired outcomes with enterprise security, performance, integration, quality, and other delivery capacity concerns.

Andrew Kum-Seun
Senior Research Analyst,
Application Delivery and Application Management
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Organizations see the value of mobile applications in improving productivity and reach of day-to-day business and IT operations. This motivates leaders to begin the planning of their first application.
• However, organizations often lack the critical foundational knowledge and skills to deliver and maintain high quality and valuable applications that meet business and user priorities and technical requirements.
• Mobile technologies and trends are continually evolving and maturing. It is hard to predict which trends will make a significant impact and to prepare current mobile investments to harness the value of these trends.

Common Obstacles

• Mobile applications can stress the stability, reliability and overall quality of your enterprise systems and services. They will also increase your security risks because of the exposure of your enterprise technology assets to unsecured networks and devices.
• High costs of entry may restrict what native features your users can have in their mobile experience. Workarounds may not be sufficient to offset the costs of certain native feature needs.
• Many operating models do not enable or encourage the collaboration required to fully understand user needs and behaviors and evaluate mobile opportunities and underlying operational systems from multiple perspectives.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Establish the right expectations. Understand your mobile users by learning their needs, challenges, and behaviors. Discuss the current state of your systems and your high priority non-functional requirements to determine what to expect from your mobile applications.
• Choose the right mobile platform approach and shortlist your mobile delivery solutions. Obtain a thorough view of the business and technical complexities of your mobile opportunities, including current mobile delivery capabilities and system compatibilities.
• Create your mobile roadmap. Describe the gradual rollout of your mobile technologies through minimal valuable products (MVPs).

Insight Summary

Overarching Info-Tech Insight

Treat your mobile applications as digital products. Digital products are continuously modernized to ensure they are fit-for-purpose, secured, accessible, and immersive. A successful mobile experience involves more than just the software and supporting system. It involves good training and onboarding, efficient delivery turnaround, and a clear and rational vision and strategy.

Phase 1: Set the Mobile Context

• Build applications your users need and desire – Design the right mobile application that enables your users to address their frustrations and productivity challenges.
• Maximize return on your technology investments – Build your mobile applications with existing web APIs, infrastructure, and services as much as possible.
• Prioritize mobile security, performance and integration requirements – Understand the unique security, performance, and integration influences has on your desired mobile user experience. Find the right balance of functional and non-functional requirements through business and IT collaboration.

Phase 2: Define Your Mobile Approach

• Start with a mobile web platform - Minimize disruptions to your existing delivery process and technical stack by building against common web standards. Select a hybrid platform or cross-platform if you need device hardware access or have complicated non-functional requirements.
• Focus your mobile solution decision on vendor support and functional complexity – Verify that your solution is not only compatible with the architecture, data, and policies of existing business systems, but satisfies IT's concerns with access to restricted technology and data, and with IT's ability to manage and operate your applications.
• Anticipate changes, defects & failures in your roadmap - Quickly shift your mobile roadmaps according to user feedback, delivery challenges, value, and stability.

Mobile is how the business works today

Mobile adoption continues to grow in part due to the need to be a mobile workforce, and the shift in customer behaviors. This reality pushed the industry to transform business processes and technologies to better support the mobile way of working.

Mobile Builds Interests
61%
Mobile devices drove 61% of visits to U.S. websites
Source: Perficient, 2021

Mobile Maintains Engagement
54%
Mobile devices generated 54.4% of global website traffic in Q4 2021.
Source: Statista, 2022

Mobile Drives Productivity
82%
According to 82% of IT executives, smartphones are highly important to employee productivity
Source: Samsung and Oxford Economics, 2022

Mobile applications enable and drive your digital business strategy

Organizations know the criticality of mobile applications in meeting key business and digital transformation goals, and they are making significant investments. Over half (58%) of organizations say their main strategy for driving application adoption is enabling mobile access to critical enterprise systems (Enterprise CIO, 2016). The strategic positioning and planning of mobile applications are key for success.

Mobile Can Motivate, Support and Drive Progress in Key Activities Underpinning Digital Transformation Goals

Goal: Enhance Customer Experience

• A shift from paper to digital communications
• Seamless, omni-channel client experiences across devices
• Create Digital interactive documents with sections that customers can customize to better understand their communications

Goal: Increase Workflow Throughput & Efficiency

• Digitized processes and use of data to improve process efficiency
• Modern IT platforms
• Automation through robotic process automation (RPA) where possible
• Use of AI and machine learning for intelligent automation

Source: Broadridge, 2022

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Define Your Digital Business Strategy blueprint.

Well developed mobile applications bring unique opportunities to drive more value

Info-Tech Insight

If you build it, they may not come. Design and build the applications your user wants and needs, and ensure users are properly onboarded and trained. Learn how your applications are leveraged, capture feedback from the user and system dashboards, and plan for enhancements, fixes, and modernizations.

Workers expect IT to deliver against their high mobile expectations

Workers want sophisticated mobile applications like what they see their peers and competitors use.

Why is IT considering building their own applications?

• Complex and Unique Workflows: Canned templates and shells are viewed as incompatible to the workflows required to complete worker responsibilities outside the office, with the same level of access to corporate data as on premise.
• Supporting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD): Developing your own mobile applications around your security protocols and standards can help mitigate the risks with personal devices that are already in your workforce.
• Long-Term Architecture Misalignment: Outsourcing mobile development risks the mobile application misaligned with your quality standards or incompatible with other enterprise and third-party systems.

Continuously meeting aggressive user expectations will not be easy

Value Quickly Wears Off
39.9% of users uninstall an application because it is not in use.
40%
Source: n=2,000, CleverTap, 2021

Low Tolerance to Waiting
Keeping a user waiting for 3 seconds is enough to dissatisfy 43% of users.
43%
Source: AppSamurai, 2018

Quick Fixes Are Paramount
44% of defects are found by users
44%
Source: Perfecto Mobile, 2014

Mobile emphasizes the importance of good security, performance, and integration

Today's mobile workers are looking for new ways to get more work done quickly. They want access to enterprise solutions and data directly on their mobile devices, which can reside on multiple legacy systems and in the cloud and third-party infrastructure. This presents significant performance, integration, and security risks.

Accept change as the norm

IT is challenged with keeping up with disruptive technologies, such as mobile, which are arriving and changing faster and faster.

What is the issue? Mobile priorities, concepts, and technologies do not remain static. For example, current Google's Pixels benefit from at least three versions of Android updates and at least three years of monthly security patches after their release (NextPit, 2022). Keeping up to date with anything mobile is difficult if you do not have the right delivery and product management practices in place.

What is the impact on IT? Those who fail to prepare for changing requirements and technologies will quickly run into maintainability, extensibility, and flexibility issues. Mobile applications will quickly become stale and misaligned with the maturity of other enterprise infrastructure and applications.

Continuously look at the trends, vendor roadmaps, and your user's feedback to envision where your mobile applications should be. Learning from your past attempts gives you insights on the opportunities and impacts changes will have on your people, process, and technology.

How do I address this issue? A well-defined mobile vision and roadmap ensures your initiatives are aligned with your holistic business and technology strategies, the right problem is being solved, and resources are available to deliver high priority changes.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Deliver on Your Digital Product Vision blueprint.

Address the difficulties in managing enterprise mobile technologies

Adaptability During Development

Teams must be ready to alter their mobile approach when new insights and issues arise during and after the delivery of your mobile application and its updates.

High Cybersecurity Standards

Cybersecurity should be a top priority given the high security exposure of mobiles and the sensitive data mobile applications need to operate. Role-based access, back-up systems, advanced scanning, and protection software and encryption should all be implemented.

Integration with Other Systems

Your application will likely be integrated with other systems to expand service offerings and optimize performance and user experience. Your enterprise integration strategy ensures all systems connect against a common pattern with compatible technologies.

Finding the Right Mobile Developers

Enterprise mobile delivery requires a broad skillset to build valuable applications against extensive non-functional requirements in complex and integration environments. The right resources are even harder to find when native applications are preferred over web-based ones.

Source: Radoslaw Szeja, Netguru, 2022.

Build and manage the right experience by treating mobile as digital products

Digital products are continuously modernized to ensure they are fit-for-purpose, secured, insightful, accessible, and interoperable. A good experience involves more than just technology.

First, deliver the experience end users want and expect by designing the application against digital application principles.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Modernize Your Applications blueprint.

Then, deliver a long-lasting experience by supporting your applications with key governance and management capabilities.

• Product Strategy and Roadmap
• External Relationships
• User Adoption and Organizational Change Management
• Funding
• Knowledge Management
• Stakeholder Management
• Product Governance
• Maintenance & Enhancement
• User Support
• Managing and Governing Data
• Requirements Analysis and Design
• Research & Development

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Make the Case for Product Delivery blueprint.

Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

Maximize the value of your mobile investments by prioritizing technology decisions on user experience, business priorities, and system quality.

	WORKFLOW
1. Capture Your User Personas and Journey
2. Select Your Platform
3. Shortlist Your Solutions

Make user experience (UX) the standard

User experience (UX) focuses on a user's emotions, beliefs, and physical and psychological responses that occur before, during, or after interacting with a service or product.

For a mobile application to be meaningful, the functions, aesthetics and content must be:

• Usable
  • Users can intuitively navigate through your mobile application and complete their desired tasks.
• Desirable
  • The application elements are used to evoke positive emotions and appreciation.
• Accessible
  • Users can easily use your mobile application, including those with disabilities.
• Valuable
  • Users find the content useful, and it fulfills a need.

Enable a greater experience with UX-driven thinking

Designing for a high-quality experience requires more than just focusing on the UI. It also requires the merging of multiple business, technical, and social disciplines in order to create an immersive, practical, and receptive application. The image on the right explains the disciplines involved in UX. This is critical for ensuring users have a strong desire to use the mobile application, it is adequately supported technically, and it supports business objectives.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Implement and Mature Your User Experience Design Practice blueprint.

Source: Marky Roden, Xomino, 2018

Define the mobile experience your end users want

• Anytime, Anywhere
  • The user can access, update and analyze data and corporate products and services whenever they want, in all networks, and on any device.
• Hands-Off and Automated
  • The application can perform various workflows and tasks without the user's involvement and notify the user when specific triggers are hit.
• Personalized and Insightful
  • Content presentation and subject are tailored for the user based on specific inputs from the user, device hardware, or predicted actions.
• Integrated Ecosystem
  • The application supports a seamless experience across various third-party and enterprise applications and services the user needs.
• Visually Pleasing and Fulfilling
  • The UI is intuitive and aesthetically gratifying, with little security and performance trade-offs to use the full breadth of its functions and services.

Each mobile platform has its own take on the mobile native experience. The choice ultimately depends on whether the costs and effort are worth the anticipated value.

Mobile value is dependent on the platform you choose

What is a platform?

"A platform is a set of software and a surrounding ecosystem of resources that helps you to grow your business. A platform enables growth through connection: its value comes not only from its own features, but from its ability to connect external tools, teams, data, and processes." (Source: Emilie Nøss Wangen, 2021) In the mobile context, applications in a platform execute and communicate through a loosely-coupled API architecture, whether the supporting system is managed and supported by your organization or by third-party providers.

Web

Mobile web applications are deployed and executed within the mobile web browser. They are often developed with a combination of web and scripting languages, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Web often takes two forms on mobile:

• Progressive Web Applications (PWA)
• Mobile Web Sites

Hybrid

Hybrid applications are developed with web technologies but are deployed as native applications. The code is wrapped using a framework so that it runs locally within a native container. It uses the device's browser runtime engine to support more sophisticated designs and features than to the web approach.

Cross-Platform

Cross-platform applications are developed within a distinct programming or scripting environment that uses its own scripting language (often like web languages) and APIs. The solution compiles the code into device-specific builds for native deployment.

Native

Native applications are developed and deployed to specific devices and OSs using platform-specific software development kits (SDKs) provided by the operating system vendors. The programming language and framework are dictated by the targeted device, such as Java for Android.

Start mobile development on a mobile web platform

Start with what you have: begin with a mobile web platform to minimize impacts to your existing delivery skill sets and technical stack while addressing business needs. Resort to a hybrid first. Then consider a cross-platform application if you require device access or need to meet specific non-functional requirements.

Why choose a mobile web platform?

Other Notable Benefits with Web Languages

• Modern browsers in most mobile devices can execute and render many mobile features developed in web languages, allowing for greater portability and sophistication of code across multiple devices. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of performance since the browser's runtime engine will not perform as well as a native engine.
• Web languages are well known by developers, minimizing skills and resourcing impacts. Consequently, changes can be quickly accommodated and updated uniformly across all end users.

Select your mobile platform

Drive your mobile platform selection against user-centric needs (e.g. device access, aesthetics) and enterprise-centric needs (e.g. security, system performance).

Understand the common attributes of a mobile delivery solution

• Source Code Management – Built-in or having the ability to integrate with code management solutions for branching, merging, and versioning. Debugging and coding assistance capabilities may be available.
• Single Code Base – Capable of programming in a standard coding and scripting language for deployment into several platforms and devices. This code base is aligned to a common industry framework (e.g. AngularJS, Java) or a vendor-defined one.
• Out-of-the-Box Connectors & Plug-ins – Pre-built APIs enhance the solution's capabilities with third-party tools and systems to deliver and manage high quality and valuable mobile applications.
• Emulators – Ability to virtualize an application's execution on a target platform and device.
• Support for Native Features – Supports plug-ins and APIs for access to device-specific features.

What are mobile delivery solutions?

A mobile delivery solution provides the tools, resources, and support to enable or build your mobile application. It can provide pre-built applications, vendor supported components to allow some configurations, or resources for full stack customizations. Solutions can be barebone software development kits (SDKs), or comprehensive suites offering features to support the entire software delivery lifecycle, such as:

• Mobile application management
• Testing and publishing to app stores
• Content management
• Cloud hosting
• Application performance management

Info-Tech Insight

Mobile enablement and development capabilities are already embedded in many common productivity tools and enterprise applications, such as Microsoft PowerApps and ERP modules. They can serve as a starting point in the initial rollout of new management and governance practices without the need to acquire new tools.

Select your mobile delivery solutions

1. Set the scope of your framework.
• The initial context of this framework is based on the mobile functions needed to support your desired mobile experience and on the current state of your enterprise and 3rd party systems.
2. Define the decision factors for your solution selection.
   • Review the decision factors that will influence the selection of your mobile delivery solution for each mobile opportunity:
   • Stack Management – Who will be hosting and supporting your mobile application stack?
   • Workflows Complexity & Native Experience – How complex is your desired mobile experience and how will native device features be leveraged?
3. Select your solution type.
   • Mobile delivery solutions are broadly defined in the following groups:
   • Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) – Pre-built mobile applications requiring little to no configurations or implementation effort.
   • Vendor Hosted Mobile Platform – Back-end and mid-tier infrastructure and operational support are managed by a vendor.
   • Cross-Platform Development – Frameworks that transform a single code base into platform-specific builds.
   • Hybrid Development – Tools that wrap a single code base into a locally deployable build.
   • Custom Web Development – Environment enabling full stack development for mobile web applications.
   • Custom Native Development – Environment enabling full stack development for mobile native applications.

Optimize your software delivery process

Mobile brings new delivery and management challenges that are often difficult for organizations that are tied to legacy systems, hindered by rigid and slow delivery lifecycles, and are unable to adopt leading-edge technologies. Many of these challenges stem from the fact that mobile is a significant shift from desktop development:

• Mobile devices and operating systems are heavily fragmented, especially in the Android space.
• Test coverage is significantly expanded to include physical environments and multiple network connections.
• Mobile devices do not have the same performance capabilities and memory storage as their desktop counterparts.
• The user interface must be strategically designed to accommodate the limited screen size.
• Mobile applications are highly susceptible to security breaches.
• Mobile users often expect quick turnaround time on fixes and enhancements due to continuously changing technology, business priorities, and user needs.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Modernize Your SDLC blueprint.

How should the process change?

• Cross-functional collaboration – Bringing business and IT together at the most opportune times to clarify user needs and business priorities, and set realistic expectations given technology and capacity constraints. The appropriate tactics and techniques are used to improve decision making and delivery effectiveness according to the type of work.
• Iterative delivery – Frequent delivery of progressive changes minimizes the risk of low-quality features by containing and simplifying scope, and enables responsive turnarounds of fixes, enhancements, and priority changes.
• Feedback loops –Mobile application owners constantly review, update and refine their backlog of mobile features and changes to reflect user feedback and system performance metrics. Delivery teams proactively prepare the application for future scaling based on lessons and feedback learned from earlier releases.

Achieve mobile success with MVPs

By delivering mobile capabilities in small iterations, teams recognize value sooner and reduce accumulated risk. Both benefits are realized as the iteration enters validation testing and release.

An MVP focuses on a small set of functions, involves minimal possible effort to deliver a working and valuable solution, and is designed to satisfy a specific user group. Its purpose is to:

• Maximize learning.
• Evaluate the value and acceptance of mobile applications.
• Inform the building of a mobile delivery practice.

The build-measure-learn loop suggests mobile delivery teams should perpetually take an idea and develop, test, and validate it with the mobile development solution, then expand on the MVP using the lessons learned and evolving ideas. In this sense the MVP is just the first iteration in the loop.

Gauge the value with the right metrics

Metrics are a powerful way to drive behavior change in your organization. But metrics are highly prone to creating unexpected outcomes so they must be used with great care. Use metrics judiciously to avoid gaming or ambivalent behavior, productivity loss, and unintended consequences.

To learn more, visit Info-Tech's Select and Use SDLC Metrics Effectively blueprint.

What should I measure?

1. Mobile Application Engagement, Retention and User Satisfaction
   1. The activeness of users on the applications, the number of returning users, and the happiness of the users.
   2. Example: Number of tasks completed, number of active and returning users, session length and intervals, user satisfaction
2. Value Driven from Mobile Applications
   1. The business value that the user directly or indirectly receives with the mobile application.
   2. Example: Mobile application revenue, business operational costs, worker productivity, business reputation and image
3. Delivery Throughput and Quality
   1. The health and quality of your mobile applications throughout their lifespan and the speed to deliver working applications that meet stakeholder expectations.
   2. Example: Frequency of release, lead time, request turnaround, escaped defects, test coverage.

Use Info-Tech's diagnostic to evaluate the reception of your mobile applications

Info-Tech's Application Portfolio Assessment (APA) Diagnostic is a canned end-user satisfaction survey used to evaluate your application portfolio health to support data-driven decisions.

USE THE PROGRAM DIAGNOSTIC TO:

• Assess the importance and satisfaction of enterprise applications.
• Solicit feedback from your end users on applications being used.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of your current applications.
• Perform a high-level application rationalization initiative.

INTEGRATE DIAGNOSTIC RESULTS TO:

• Target which applications to analyze in greater detail.
• Expand on the initial application rationalization results with a more comprehensive and business-value-focused criteria.

Grow your mobile delivery practice

Level 1: Mobile Delivery Foundations

You understand the opportunities and impacts mobile has on your business operations and its disruptive nature on your enterprise systems. Your software delivery lifecycle was optimized to incorporate the specific practices and requirements needed for mobile. A mobile platform was selected based on stakeholder needs that are weighed against current skillsets, high priority non-functional requirements, the available capacity and scalability of your stack, and alignment to your current delivery process.

Level 2: Scaled Mobile Delivery

New features and mobile use cases are regularly emerging in the industry. Ensuring your mobile platform and delivery process can easily scale to incorporate constantly changing mobile features and technologies is key. This can help minimize the impact these changes will have on your mobile stack and the resulting experience.

Achieving this state requires three competencies: mobile security, performance optimization, and integration practices.

Level 3: Leading-Edge Mobile Delivery

Many of today's mobile trends involve, in one form or another, hardware components on the mobile device (e.g., NFC receivers, GPS, cameras). You understand the scope of native features available on your end user's mobile device and the required steps and capabilities to enable and leverage them.

Hit a home run with your stakeholders

Use a data-driven approach to select the right tooling vendor for your needs – fast.

Investing time improving your software selection methodology has big returns.

Info-Tech Insight

Not all software selection projects are created equal – some are very small, some span the entire enterprise. To ensure that IT is using the right framework, understand the cost and complexity profile of the application you're looking to select. Info-Tech's Rapid Application Selection Framework approach is best for commodity and mid-tier enterprise applications; selecting complex applications is better handled by the methodology in Info-Tech's Implement a Proactive and Consistent Vendor Selection Process.

Pitch your mobile delivery approach with Info-Tech's template

Communicate the justification of your approach to mobile applications with Info-Tech's Mobile Application Delivery Communication Template:

• Level set your mobile application goals and objectives by weighing end user expectations with technical requirements.
• Define the high priority opportunities for mobile applications.
• Educate decision makers of the limitations and challenges of delivering specific mobile experiences with the various mobile platform options.
• Describe your framework to select the right mobile platform and delivery tools.
• Lay out your mobile delivery roadmap and initiatives.

INFO-TECH DELIVERABLE

Info-Tech's methodology for mobile platform and delivery solution selection

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

"Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful."

Guided Implementation

"Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track."

Workshop

"We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place."

Consulting

"Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project."

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is 6 to 9 calls over the course of 2 to 3 months.

Workshop Overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Phase 1

Set the Mobile Context

Choose Your Mobile Platform and Tools

This phase will walk you through the following steps:

• Step 1.1 – Build Your Mobile Backlog
• Step 1.2 – Identify Your Technical Needs
• Step 1.3 – Define Your Non-Functional Requirements

This phase involves the following participants:

• Applications Manager
• Product and Platform Owners
• Software Delivery Teams
• Business and IT Leaders

Step 1.1

Build Your Mobile Backlog

Activities

1.1.1 Generate user personas with empathy maps

1.1.2 Build your mobile application canvas

1.1.3 Build your mobile backlog

Set the Mobile Context

This step involves the following participants:

• Applications Manager
• Product and Platform Owners
• Software Delivery Teams
• Business and IT Leaders

Outcomes of this step

• User personas
• Mobile objectives and metrics
• Mobile opportunity backlog