No longer a luxury for only the largest organisations, mobility has become a necessity to maintaining a competitive edge in the market for all businesses regardless of size.

But giving your staff and customers access to business applications at any time, on any device from anywhere is no longer enough to maximise the value of a mobile investment. As mobility becomes the norm more is required to keep your edge – are your mobile apps fit for purpose, user friendly, easy to update, secure and well supported?

A few weeks ago we touched on the many benefits and challenges businesses face when transitioning into the cloud and embarking on a mobile strategy. However, mobile isn’t just changing the way you do business. The way you fund your mobile projects is also fundamentally shifting. Mobile applications built under traditional models can be costly, with development taking months and costing tens or hundreds of thousand dollars for a single application. Once deployed an app can quickly become stagnant and obsolete with ongoing development requiring further capital investment. As your business evolves, your apps need to evolve with it.

Taking a leaf out of the software as a service (“SaaS”) model, Mobility as a Service (“MaaS”) is a new way of serving up development of custom designed apps in the cloud to address the challenges of the traditional model. For a monthly fee, a mobile app can be developed and supported ongoing so that as your business requirements change, the app can too. This helps businesses to improve speed to market and flexibility at low cost.

There is a tension between IT and other parts of the organisation tasked with deploying mobile strategy. Where mobile design is driven by a technical team the focus tends to be on data structures and workflows, rather than user experience. When other business units such as marketing are driving production, a beautifully designed user friendly application may have functionality or security concerns that result in the project becoming dead in the ground.

This friction is a challenge, but when managed correctly can deliver amazing results for your business. It means you need a team that looks at your needs from every angle to ensure that the end result is reliable and secure, yet easy to use, fit for purpose and delivers on the goals of the organisation.

Learn more about how mobilising your workforce can improve operational efficiency and decrease business costs.