Making Apps Work for Your Business

With the explosion of the mobile Internet and the rise of the smartphone and tablet, consumers and business professionals alike are now completely familiar with the idea of ‘Apps’ – small programs that they can use to perform useful tasks while on the road or from their desks.

In response, corporate IT teams are facing increasing pressure to emulate the success of consumer Apps, being downloaded in their billions according to suppliers like Apple and Google, and offer their own Apps. But how can such Apps be built easily and successfully and in such a way that conforms to established norms of enterprise IT disciplines and governance structures? Should third parties alone build them or does IT need to skill up in this area as soon as possible?
This bulletin has been complied through the shared experiences of 18 different organisations, including representatives from media and publishing, financial services, engineering, transport, local government, logistics, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, entertainment and leisure, retail, construction and maintenance. They represent an annual IT spend of £2.7 billion, employ over 370,000 staff and have nearly 100 years collective experience of building and developing Apps.

Key Findings

• App building is in many ways ‘fun’ and marks a kind of renaissance for Organisations stress the need to get something out quickly – but add that ‘something’ has to be as simple as possible, or it won’t be accepted
• Apps have to be highly usable and intuitive
• Apps can present excellent opportunities for business process redesign
• Third parties come in two flavours: highly corporate and SMEs with great design skills but who may not understand enterprise issues.

The full report is available online here – free to logged in members of The Forum