Enterprises are capitalizing on the mobile app phenomenon by building innovative apps to communicate with their staff and to enable them to work anytime, anywhere.

As more and more businesses use enterprise mobility apps to complement their core business, the use of corporate apps will continue to grow. This means more opportunities for mobile app developers and cross platform mobile development experts to test their ideas, skills, and creativity to find their niche in this thriving marketplace.

According to research firm Gartner, by 2017 the demand for such development will increase five times faster than companies and IT departments can keep pace with. With mobile phone sales expected to reach 2.1 billion units in 2019, it will fuel demand for enterprise mobile apps that are just as useful and popular as consumer apps. We look at reasons why.

Customized to business needs

Corporate apps are customized to an organization’s core business needs and there are several use cases, for example, such as helping its field sales and marketing teams effectively present solutions to customers. They also enable staff on the go to access the latest product brochures or information where document management and distribution platforms make sure that employees have up-to-date information when they need it. There is no need to share multiple versions of files and to look for misplaced documents. Staff can gather information from customers and prospects and enter this data into the corporate or customer relationship management databases efficiently. This saves workers time and ensures that they stay in the loop.

Train and develop anywhere, anytime

Such apps deliver learning content to their workers on the go. They are interactive, up-to-date and enable workers to sign up for courses online. This way, employees can learn anytime, anywhere and at their own pace. Workers can also keep up to date with company news and industry developments.

Employee engagement

Employees are already having to pay attention to the emails they get on a daily basis from their co-workers and external customers. A corporate app should not add to this burden.

Do keep in mind the following suggestions when building a corporate app:

• Consider the group of employees you are designing the app for. When creating a product for the public at large, the first step is to consider your audience. The same goes for the corporate app.

• Talk to your staff and find out about the culture of the department, get their feedback and find out what they actually need. It may sound simple to say but until you actually talk to the people who are actually doing the job day in and day out, creating an app you think may help them, may not actually address their needs.

• Build engagement with your employees. If your staff find the apps useful and understand that these will help to make their lives easier, they will want to adopt this into their daily work routine.

• The lives of employees hang on their mobile devices. A good suggestion, at this point, would be to incorporate location services and image capabilities to connect staff and share information more efficiently. Include a variety of media such as interactive, videos and embedded documents. This level of interactivity engages staff, enabling them to be more productive. The best corporate apps work because they enable organizations to engage their employees and to bring productivity increases and faster business processes. The bigger picture is that the organization gains insights (through analytics and such software) into the work habits of its employees, which in the long term, will enable it to fine-tune business processes for greater productivity and rewards. Do your employees work in the field? Give them offline access.

• Keep apps up-to-date so that the latest information and documents can be distributed to the work force so as to ensure that everyone is working on the same digital page. Nothing is more frustrating than spending time working on outdated documents or data.

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Rapid mobile app development (RMAD) utilizes code-free programming tools to speed the process of creating applications for mobile platforms, and as the demand for mobile apps accelerates, the use of RMAD should also logically increase. And mobile app development is getting faster, easier, and cheaper for enterprises to achieve.

“Demand for mobile apps in the enterprise is growing, but the urgency to scale up mobile app development doesn’t yet appear to be a priority for most organizations,” said Adrian Leow, principal research analyst at Gartner. “This must change, particularly given employees often have the autonomy to choose the devices, apps and even the processes to complete a task. This places an increasing amount of pressure on IT to develop a larger variety of mobile apps in shorter time frames.”

The majority of enterprises are focused on developing custom mobile apps, a logical extension of the fact that most development teams use custom app development for all of their apps.

RMAD adoption is growing in the enterprise, because it has the potential to “unleash app dev in a big way,” says Jason Wong, principal research analyst at Gartner.  He explains that this is become modern mobility is “a user-centric approach to the mobile experience and takes into account context across multiple channels and interaction surfaces. Many people say that mobile [experiences] will become embedded into applications, but I see it as modern mobility being so essential that it is immediately noticeable if not done right, such as still have app silos or the inability to deliver insights at the right moment.”

Gartner predicts that 70 percent of enterprise mobile apps will be developed with no IT involvement by 2020. IT will serve only as an enabler, not as a creator, of these apps. And when IT embraces RMAD, it can unleash app development in a big way, using micro apps across departments to achieve the company’s goals.

Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst John Rymer told Tech.co: “If we rely solely on coding, we’re going to fail. It’s too slow. It’s too inflexible.” Data from a recent study by Standish Group found that 94 percent of large IT projects fail, over-shoot the budget and schedule, or deliver below expectations due to various factors. That means that many enterprises are reluctant to invest time and dollars into app development that might have risky returns.

So what does this mean for enterprises hoping to break into the mobile app arena?

1. First, adoption of RMAD can help make the most of your investment dollars, allowing IT departments to meet their project deadlines, while improving their overall quality; focus on projects most likely to help the enterprise grow; and help company executives can better communicate with IT, empowering more IT projects to be successful, all at an investment level that is sustainable. And using RMAD, companies can use low-code or no-code platforms to prototype apps, and if the idea is good, the app can be created through mobile developers.

2. Second, it allows enterprises to circumvent the scarcity of developer talent and its correlating expense that have kept many organizations from building their own apps, a burden that RMAD platforms can help lighten.

3. Third, now is the time to reprioritize and adopt RMAD practices in order to further your brand. The RMAD approach is an easy way to allow players in the enterprise to quickly manage apps and bring critical business elements mobile, particularly seasonal apps that might be time sensitive or have a short shelf life.

4. And lastly, once you have created your RMAD program, development of an enterprise app store can also help reduce app management fragmentation and rogue apps. Gartner’s study found that, on average, organizations have 26 mobile apps in their own enterprise store.

Let Smarter Business Processes  help you leverage RMAD to create powerful mobile apps to drive your business.

The post New Gartner Study Finds Opportunities Ripe For Rapid Mobile App Development in 2016 appeared first on SmarterBusinessProcesses.

We’re pretty excited that Gartner Inc., one of the most prominent technology research companies in the world, decided to name Smartsheet as a “Cool Vendor” for 2015.

How cool is that?

Each year, Gartner selects companies in critical technology areas and publishes a series of reports detailing why these products and services were chosen. Or, essentially, why they’re pretty cool.

Cool Vendors are selected because they are innovative, unique, and have a real market impact. Smartsheet was one of just four Software as a Service (SaaS) companies included in the 2015 Program and Portfolio report.

Click here to download the Report

So, What Makes Smartsheet So Cool?

• It helps anyone get more work done.
• It provides transparency and visibility into projects.
• It combines the most powerful features of Excel, Dropbox, Microsoft Project, and email.

Boost Productivity and Drive Results With Smartsheet

If you’re using Smartsheet, you know we have a familiar spreadsheet interface and an abundance of intuitive collaboration features to help people, teams, departments, and entire companies coordinate anything.

We’re fortunate to help industry-leading organizations like Cisco, Google, Bayer, Groupon, HomeAway, DHL, and others get work done, easily, and more efficiently. With six million users worldwide, we help companies boost productivity, streamline communication, and drive results.

Now, that’s cool.

Read the Cool Vendor Report by Gartner to learn more.

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