Deep Dev

The Down Low on Winning Apps

Evidence that mobile budgets are on the up and up is usually seen as cause for celebration, especially amongst vendors looking forward to eating a larger and tastier piece of the technology investment pie. Now, while I like pie as much as the next man, it would be remiss of me—irresponsible even—to ignore the implications of market research released by Antenna Software, the equally-pie-happy vendor I work for, which suggests that the growth in mobile budgets is unsustainable and that we are, as an industry, not doing enough to ensure that we’re earning our keep (read: pie).

Are you getting enough of the mobile pie?

I promise not to say anything more about pie if you keep reading. Assuming that you’ve agreed to that ‘bargain,’ you’ll want to hear what Antenna has revealed and why it threatens the rise in mobile business budgets. Here’s the story: Antenna tasked business research specialists Vanson Bourne with surveying 1,000 IT and business ‘decision makers’ on, amongst other things, the adoption they’ve seen when they’ve developed a mobile asset (be it app, web-app, mobile website, storefront, or content portal) for their own workers. In the business, and especially in the US, we call this ‘enterprise’ development. The specific question was: “If you’ve commissioned enterprise mobile projects in the past, to what degree have they been adopted by your employees?” The results of asking this question were quite sobering: only 1 in 4 respondents were able to state that their completed enterprise mobile projects have been taken up by the majority of the employees they were intended for. And 41 percent (i.e. a lot) of the respondents revealed that their enterprise projects have been taken up by only a quarter or less of the employees they were built for.

It is evident from these responses that both time and money being spent on giving employees tools to make their working lives easier and better is potentially going to waste. Moreover, when you consider that, to date, UK and US businesses have already spent an average of $431k on mobility projects and plan to spend an average of $456k on employee-facing mobile development in the next 12-18 months alone, it becomes clear that we’re talking about a lot of time and a lot of money. If businesses are consistently getting a poor return on their investment in mobile it is likely, highly likely even, that they will limit their spending in this area (despite demand), and that’s where the threat to the mobile business budget growth rate comes in.

So, the obvious question is – what’s going wrong? Why are so many enterprise mobile projects being left on the shelf? In my opinion, poor aesthetic and technical design is to blame. Too many apps and mobile websites are built without reference to the end user and without due consideration of the ‘use case’, i.e. why the mobile project is actually being undertaken in the first place. Through speaking to customers about their former/failed projects, it has become clear to me that too many mobile enterprise assets are built without the requisite offline functionality, and suffer from poor user interfaces and/or a failure to leverage the capabilities of the devices they’re running on. It’s also clear that the mobile software implementations which succeed do so because they are dedicated to one specific task or set of tasks (e.g. co-ordinating meeting room bookings), have the capability to keep the user informed as to what they’re doing at any given moment (e.g. they ‘notify’ the user when they are working on a calculation or accessing specific information), and are aggressively tested, in prototype form, in the wild, before they are rolled out across the business as a whole.

As an industry, we need a higher proportion of mobile projects to succeed. To make that happen we need everyone to join in the discussion about best practices and we need to champion them with our own work. The result of failing to do that is unthinkable. The result is less pie, for all of us.

Have you had a challenge rolling out an enterprise mobile app?  What’s been the main issue?