Cracking The Complexities In Enterprise App Development

8.
Cracking The Complexities In Enterprise App Development
Let Users
Dictate Needs
Because of the complexities of
ensuring an optimal user experience
across multiple OS and device
platforms in the mobile world,
companies often compromise on
user experience or burn time on
a back-and-forth process across
stakeholders. This situation is
exacerbated by the lack of support
for technical and non-technical
personnel to work together, for
developers to concurrently build
applications, and for the reuse of
common application components
and services.
But most IT organizations have very
limited designer resources or design
skills. Hiring a lot of designers is often
not economically feasible. Instead of
bringing in extra design resources,
or asking business users to learn
programming languages, end users
can now leverage platforms that
abstract away from code, making
development possible for a greater
number of people.
Tech executives believe building
apps should not be exclusive to
technically trained developers and
designers. In fact, the overwhelming
majority of business leaders say
it’s important to enable non-IT
developers, or citizen developers, to
deliver mobile apps (Figure 8).
“It’s extremely important to provide
the right tools for developers to use,”
Banks said. “I use the analogy of a
‘spice rack’ in which a library and
snippets of code can be stored for
later use. This way teams don’t have
to reinvent the wheel and libraries
will be written only once.”
Streamlining the functions and
capabilities in a one-stop-shop
space – the cloud – will enable those
citizen developers to customize the
app and make it easier to use for
their personal business production
needs. More than 33-percent of
those surveyed said a simple, one
screen data mobilization app would
best suit the non-IT developer and
end-user (Figure 9).
The end-user is driving expectations
on how apps should look, feel, and
function. Shouldn’t that same person
be able to customize the product’s
capabilities to create a more
effective technology?
Figure 8: How important is
enabling non-IT developers
(i.e. citizen developers) to
deliver mobile applications?
e Somewhat important 43%
e Very important 38%
e Not important 19%