Organizations these days are keen to deploy an enterprise-wide mobile deployment strategy in order to build its business and improve productivity, as they are experiencing a boost in their performance with a mobile strategy. Improved mobile phone technology like smartphones technology, high speed data etc. also add to the successful deployment and execution of enterprise applications over mobile.
Mobility offers tremendous business growth opportunities to a business in many ways among which, mobile business intelligence and wireless ERPs are some of the applications of a mobile strategy. However, deploying and developing an enterprise mobile application is equally challenging for the consumers as well for the developers. While designing an efficient mobile strategy, government policies and continuously changing customer's requirements are few of the challenges faced by software programmers. Some other difficulties faced by the developers are:
- Quality of the application: Developing a customer-centric, qualitative application is a crucial aspect as the success or failure of the app depends on this. Users of applications not only consider the functionality but the design and look of the app for appropriate user-friendliness. If an application fails to engage its user for its business purposes and if it is not highly intuitive from user's perspective, there are chances that the application may not be deployed for further use, affecting the reputation of the developing organization.
- Diversification in mobile OSs: Variety of mobile platforms requires the adjustment of the code according to the syntax of the OS, which it supports and executes for operations. This process increases the time of development of enterprise software and hinders the approach of businesses to deliver the product in shortest possible time.
- Back-end Integration: Provisioning the back-end application servers and systems for mobile apps is required to be accomplished before deploying the application. However, doing so is a complex task in itself as it may require the re-writing of the code of server for each application, such re-writing may create issues of communication with the existing systems.
- Software security: For some crucial applications related to finance or mobile software dealing with corporate data such as CRM, ERP, there is a strong need to secure the app at each level of code. Any data manipulation or intrusion may cause serious damage to the organization and so developers need to emphasize on embedding the security features of the OS or hard code by themselves.
While developing an enterprise level mobile software, a separate programmable interface has to be coded so that back-end services can communicate with the enterprise mobile software. Special concern on various elements of back-end system need to be taken care of as few components could be there which depends on other components and so special coding for the mobile apps should be considered after the study of these dependencies. Any kind of modification can cause communication issues in the whole network and so, can halt the functioning of the organization.