In a recent article on ZDNet, writer Charles McLellan discussed a series of surveys that help frame the state of enterprise mobility here and now in 2014. In his post, he wonders: are we currently experiencing ‘App-Ocalypse Now’?
While enterprise mobile apps greatly increase productivity—respondents to a July 2013 Mobile Helix survey expected, on average, “a 36% boost in productivity if key enterprise applications were mobilized”—there’s still something holding back wider deployment of enterprise applications on mobile devices.
That holdup is, as McLellan notes, cost. 65% of respondents in that same Mobile Helix survey cited development costs as a factor leading to a slowdown in the deployment and adoption of enterprise mobile apps, with 48% citing increased support and maintenance costs. IT decision-makers in the middle of this so-called app-ocalypse are afraid of costs that apps can bring.
As it turns out, however, overcoming this obstacle is easier than you might think. With budget being a main reason that apps aren’t being developed across the enterprise, it’s time to stop looking at the app as a cost center. You can focus solely on the cost of what it takes to build and maintain an app, sure, but doing so completely misses the point of what enterprise mobile apps are all about.
Instead of thinking about how much your app costs to develop or how much you’ll spend maintaining mobile apps across the enterprise, IT decision-makers need to view enterprise mobile apps as a way to save time or generate revenue. Even though an app could cost $50-100 thousand over the course of its lifetime, the analytics offered in an enterprise mobile app management solution like App47 can allow you to track the ROI of the app you invested in.
We’re not saying that IT decision-makers need to ignore the cost of mobile apps. Instead, we’re saying that if you’re not building your apps to save time or generate revenue, you’re going to have problems. Being able to measure and quantify ROI helps with this process, and can allow those that are hesitant about investing in enterprise mobile apps to see the benefits that come along with investing in these apps, instead of just the costs that go into them.
Are we in the middle of the ‘App-Ocalypse Now’? Hardly. Nothing in your business should be losing you money, and enterprise mobile apps are no exception. Increased productivity, efficiency, and revenue generation are all realities of mobile apps in the enterprise that can all be tracked with the right analytics, and the sooner that IT decision-makers can realize these benefits, the better off the entire business will be.
