Best practices for developing an enterprise mobile strategy

February 15, 2011
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Guest post by Apoorv Durga

The mobile marketplace is seeing a lot if activity. Earlier this month, Antenna Software, a provider of mobile applications mainly for enterprises, acquired Volantis Systems, a company focused on delivering content to mobile browsers, concentrated more on the consumer Internet. Then there's also this massive battle of devices being fought out there. While the key players are Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) (iOS), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) (Android) and Nokia (Symbian), RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) and HP (NYSE: HPQ)--with its newly introduced WebOS--are no pushovers. Nokia's CEO's reported memo about what's wrong at Nokia followed by the announcement of their partnership with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has made the battle even more interesting.

So if you have it in your strategy to target the vast mobile population, this sort of market activity makes it tricky to decide what kind of devices you should support. As it stands, there are two key alternatives:

  1. Create native applications that are optimized for different device-OS combinations
  2. Create web applications that target a broader mobile population

 Pros
 Cons
Native Applications (Apps) 
  1. Superior user experience and responsiveness
  2. Useful especially for applications that are transactional or in use cases where a user has to interact
  3. Can work around browser limitations
  4. Provide better/tighter access to handset information and properties (such as address book)
  5. Can work in offline mode
  1. Not a scalable model. With multiples operating systems, it is difficult to keep supporting new OS versions and different SDKs
  2. How many apps can a user download?
  3. Require specialized knowledge of proprietary SDKs
  4. Difficult to upgrade
Browser Based Applications (Web Apps)
  1. Most useful for content centric, read-only use cases where information is mostly consumed
  2. Can target many more different types of devices without significant additional investments. So a much more scalable model
  3. Based on open standards
  1. A browser-based paradigm is not very efficient when you have to transact or interact. For example, an IM using browser is certainly not the best way to chat
  2. Not all devices and browsers support similar capabilities. So the ultimate experience might just not be “good enough”
  3. Not effective for offline applications or application that requires access to device capabilities such as GPS or camera

As you can see from the list above, both the approaches have their pros and cons. To be fair, with advancements to web technologies like HTML and Javascript, some of the disadvantages mentioned above for web apps will begin to subside. However, as things stand today, you should consider a holistic approach and use a combination of both the approaches. There will be certain use cases for which native apps are more useful while for others, web apps will be more useful.

Best practices

Based on Real Story Group's research, we have found that an incremental approach as opposed to a big bang approach works best.

  1. Start with following the basic tenets of content management. Create a strict separation of content from its presentation. Also make sure, the content is well structured and not just a bog blob of text. Both these will allow you to reuse and re-purpose content for variety of devices irrespective of whether you use a native app or a web app. This is where having a good web content management system will be useful.
  2. Once you have achieved this, its fairly simple to re-purpose you content for an optimized display on different devices. Most existing WCM as well as Portal products give you the ability to create a mobile-specific theme or template. This will provide immediate value, especially to "read only" visitors. You could also use a handheld-specific CSS (as recommended by W3C, by using the "media=handheld" rule).
  3. At a next level, you could extend this approach to create device specific templates or native apps for popular devices such as iPhones and Blackberries. This is useful in an enterprise scenarios when you have a reasonable control on what devices access your applications.
  4. Finally, if you would like to target broader mobile use cases, you will want to invest in a capable platform that can do device detection, identify a device's capabilities (and limitations) and then tune its output based on those.

Most WCM and Portal vendors allow you to achieve first three, although with varying degrees and different approaches. WCM vendors mostly focus on mobilizing websites while Portal vendors focus mostly on mobilizing web apps. However, very few vendors have capabilities that go beyond the basics and you will need to look at specialized vendors or do some heavy custom development.

Apoorv Durga is The Real Story Group's Portals and Web Content Management specialist based in Delhi, India. Apoorv was formerly the Practice Head of the Portals and Content Management (PCM) Practice atWipro Technologies, where he led clients in the development of their PCM strategies. He actively advised them about build/buy decisions, product evaluations, and consulting in various aspects of PCM. Apoorv has a Bachelor's degree in engineering from the Institute of Technology, Varanasi, and a Master's in management from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

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