A couple of days ago I revealed the existence of the 10 Mobile Commandments that Mobile Master Moses rendered unto us. I trust that you found the first “tablet” of Mobile Commandments enlightening. I am now prepared to reveal the second set of five commandments found on the second tablet.
6th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall guarantee end-to-end message delivery
In an occasionally connected mobile environment, guaranteed message delivery is not a foregone conclusion. You need an asynchronous messaging architecture that provides “fire and forget” transactions that allow users to not worry about wireless connectivity. More importantly, the platform should track all messages and transactions as they pass through the various touch points between the device and backend. In this manner, the flow of business-critical messages and transactions can be monitored for troubleshooting and audited for usage analysis.
7th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall centralize OTA management of users, apps and devices
Centralized, mobile management is a must-have capability. There should be role-based access for administrators and they in turn need to provide role-based access to apps by user group(s) and apply version control management over apps. App updates, incremental or whole, must be deployed easily and directly over-the-air to devices with minimal impact to users. The mobile management system should also integrate with LDAP/Active Directory for authentication and authorization.
8th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall capture and analyze detailed app usage
Powerful analytics is essential to the continuous improvement of the mobile app and to drive user satisfaction. The solution needs to track application usage in near real-time, by location, and at screen-by-screen or click-by-click level of detail. All the usage data can be reported on in a mobile management console, or it can be extracted to third party tools, such as Omniture, Tea Leaf or Google Analytics, for more in-depth analysis.
9th Commandment: Thou shall ensure scalability and redundancy for millions of users
Leveraging the Mobile Cloud can help you scale easier and faster to meet demands of users across your entire enterprise and customer base. The Mobile Cloud should easily accommodate spikes in usage at any moment—especially important for consumer apps where usage is more unpredictable than employee apps. Also, since frequent app downtime will inevitably lead to app abandonment, the Mobile Cloud should provide high availability of apps by providing load balancing and system redundancy.
10th Mobile Commandment: Thou shall secure the mobile deployment from end-to-end
Strong mobile security is critical to instilling user confidence, which will drive adoption and usage. Security needs to be inherently part of the mobility architecture, from advanced encryption to multi-factor authentication, depending on the complexity of the app. Security policy management should be centralized for administrators so that they can define the level of security by application, device type, user group or any combination thereof.
So there you have it! The Ten Mobile Commandments:
10 simple rules (albeit underpinned by complex technology) to follow when developing your mobility strategies. You may be tempted by some vendors, or even by your internal IT folks, to bypass some of these commandments – but don’t be swayed!
Remember the proverb: ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ The goal must always be low TCO and high ROI. By following the Ten Mobile Commandments you will insure this and save yourself a lot of trouble down the line, such as the possibility of ending up with a ‘stranded app’ – which will absolutely result in heavy costs to redo or update.
Here’s another very interesting bit of info – I’ve been working hard to piece together the third ‘smashed tablet’ of commandments and it’s looking to me like Mobile Master Moses has another five mobile commandments targeting “What Not to Do.” Stay tuned!
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Tags: 10 Mobile Commandments, Development, Enterprise Mobility, Jason Wong, Mobile Apps, Mobile Devices, Mobile Gourmet
