Mobile Enterprise

Axel Beauduin

Description

Mobile applications are now part of our personal daily life. Imagine how many times you spend per day running applications on your smartphone or tablet. Day-to-day applications such as your calendar, your email client or your browser; social networking apps that allow you to connect to friends and colleagues, productivity apps dedicated to practising sports, daily budgeting, travel, bookings etc. While consuming personal mobile applications is based on a "Try & Throw" model, mobile applications entering the enterprise world require a more thoughtful approach. Enterprises must have a mobility strategy.As mobile technology has entered a mature phase, companies are confident enough to start implementing mobility. Axel Beauduin and Rachid Kaouass share their experience and pragmatic vision of enterprise mobility and how best to implement it. The authors will guide you through every step of the process, from roadmap construction to the deployment of mobile applications in the enterprise. This book will be useful to all IT and non-IT business actors interested in implementing mobile solutions in their company or organisation.

Sujets

• Informatique

Informations

• Publié par: Aptys Consulting
• Date de parution: 26 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783016877
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Preface
Whether in public transport, lifts, waiting rooms, offices, living-rooms or on the street, people are reading their mobile phones or tablets. Indeed, the statistics of mobile usage for marketing, gaming, mCommerce, leisure, banking... are exploding! With two billion smartphones or tablets sold in 2014 against only 300 millions laptops/PCs, the most pressing question regarding mobile strategy is no longer “when” or “why”, but rather “how”. This book provides answers to the “how” question.
Listen to Niccolo Paganini’s “Variations on one string”. A wonderful proof that constraints free imagination and innovation. On smartphones, faced with the constraints of a small screen, developers designed miracles of usability. App after app, user interfaces reach ultimate sophistication in intuitiveness and simplicity. And more will come with smart watches and glasses. Fascinating interfaces and tactile interaction are the first fuel of successful mobile applications.
A few years ago, who could have imagined packing dozens of sophisticated sensors into a €100 device? Accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetic measurement, geo-localisation per satellite, ambient light sensor, Bluetooth, camera, barcode reader, fingerprint, temperature and humidity sensors, NFC, effort tracker...: the list is increasing every quarter and no PC can match the richness of any mobile device. Device feature integration is the second fuel of successful mobile applications.
APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are the third fuel. Scanning Facebook or Twitter feeds, displaying maps, integrating local temperature or pollution, streaming databases for efficient data, seeking authentication, etc. are “must haves” in mobile applications in this rich emerging economy of interfaces.
Of course, there are hurdles. Physical access to devices makes them much more vulnerable. Nobody ever forgot his server on the back seat of a taxi! The trade-off between usability and security is painful. Mobile device management and application containers are quite expensive, and the market is currently evolving quickly.
The second hurdle is the inertia of the major software players. With applications selling at €1.99 per user, the mobile software economy has disrupted the software business. While some start-ups are profitable because of their model based on volume, established vendors such as IBM, SAP or ORACLE struggle to provide affordable solutions and to coherently adapt their legacy offer.
The third hurdle is subtle. While the software industry has moved, during the thirty last years, from best of breed to best of overall, majority of mobile software solutions focus solely on narrow business processes. Therefore users navigate in an ocean of applications, many of which are loved during their peak of inflated expectations and deleted during the trough of disillusionment. In the mobile economy, there are unfortunately few winners and many losers.
One thing is sure, though: IT leaders will leverage the strengths of mobile: the power of the intuitive interaction, the power of sensors and the power of APIs. At the same time, they will successfully manage the hurdles: security, coexistence of legacy applications and volatility. This is my wish.
Daniel Lebeau
CIO of GlaxoSmithKline
Foreword


Why a book on mobility?
Mobile devices have been on the market for several years. Some organisations took the first step towards developing mobile solutions a few years ago. Unfortunately, only too often mobility got stuck in an exploratory phase and went no further because “technology changed too often”. This period now belongs to the past: this technology has entered a mature phase, and companies are now confident enough to start implementing mobility.
This books aims to cover all the aspects of mobile implementation, from strategic thinking to the design, delivery and implementation of mobile applications. It will help you to identify and understand the business reasons and the skills required to manage or improve mobility projects in your organisation.
Its starting point is how to devise a sound mobile strategy, including defining a vision and identifying the business cases. It also describes the different steps needed to organise a heterogeneous team composed of business and IT members, and helps you identify the appropriate technology to build your application.


To whom is this book addressed?
This book will be useful to all IT and non-IT business actors interested in implementing mobile solutions for their enterprise or organisation: CIOs Architects Business analysts Key users Project managers Developers
It will help them to understand and evaluate the added value of a mobility project, and to develop a global understanding of how to introduce mobility in an organisation.
In short, any enterprise or organisation will find in this book the information needed to build a mobile strategy, and to devise and manage a mobile implementation project (B2C  [1] or B2B  [2] or B2E  [3] ).


Best way to read this book
This book contains both technical and non-technical content. As it starts from scratch and explains all the necessary concepts, readers without any technological background will find the information they need to start discussing the implementation of mobility. On the other hand, readers who are already familiar with the technical aspects will be able to concentrate on the book’s project management and strategic insights to enrich their vision of how such projects should be led and why they differ from “traditional” IT projects.


This book contains
Chapters on strategy: A brief history of mobility Preparing for mobility
Chapters on Project Management: How to manage a mobile project UI/UX & Innovations
Chapters on Technology: Technology Security


Acknowledgments
First, we would like to thank our spouses for their patience and support during the long hours dedicated to this book.
Our recognition also goes to Aptys Consulting, who sponsored this project.
We would also like to thank our colleagues, friends and partners, who agreed to read the book and give us their feedback. In alphabetical order: Lamine Chentouf, Alain Gerardi, Caroline Walcot and Frédéric Wauters.
Finally we would like to thank Etienne Van de Kerckhove, executive partner at Es Sense, who challenged us to write this book, and Daniel Lebeau, CIO of GlaxoSmithKline, for writing the preface.

[1] B2C: Business to Consumer.

[2] B2B: Business to Business.

[3] B2E: Business to Employee.
Chapter 1 A brief history of mobility
#motivation #trends #context
The idea of mobile computing is not a new concept: it has been around since the 1990s.
The first development tools started to emerge around 2004, but with few users and very limited technologies. At the time, “nomadic” users turned out to be mainly technicians working in field maintenance operations.

Do you remember? The first PALM Pilot was born in 1996 In 1999, the Apple iBook G3 was the first consumer device to carry a Wi-Fi card Around 2003-2004, hand-held devices were running with Windows CE, Pocket PC 2003, with small screens and nice user interfaces


1.1 From nomadic technicians to phablet users
Most applications were built for technicians and were installed on devices and/or on laptops. While on the road or at a client’s premises, they needed to access company information to perform their daily tasks.
In those days, mobile networks were still limited and connecting to the Internet was quite expensive, leading to users being offline most of the time. The mobility platforms they used had to allow offline access, and provide robust synchronisation processes that were capable of efficiently handling data conflicts.

Figure 1: Historical overview
The introduction of smartphones, first the Apple iPhone, then Android-based, increased the adoption of mobility. At first they were mainly designed for private users, but Apple and Google soon improved device management and security to allow their introduction in the corporate world.
RIM, the makers of the Blackberry smartphone, had put a lot more focus on security and encryption, especially for emails. Blackberries therefore remained a must-have for managers, who were not comfortable with the lack of security of iOS and Android smartphones.
Today, most people use a smartphone, tablet or phablet  [4] . You just have to look around you in the train or in the subway to realise how ubiquitous these devices have become.


1.2 From lack of connectivity to 3G and 4G
Another important milestone that sped up the adoption of smartphones both in our private and working lives is the development of the 3G mobile Internet networks (and nowadays, of 4G). Available in many countries around the world, these networks make it possible to exchange huge amounts of data at high speeds, thus supporting extended use of mobile applications.
eMarketer expects the number of people using a mobile phone to reach 4.77 billion worldwide in 2015. New users in the developing regions of Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa will drive further increases.


1.3 From processed-focused to user-focused
User experience and design were not the main focus during the period when new mobile applications were being developed. But lack of user-friendliness rapidly became a widespread problem: neither laptop nor mainframe applications nor websites were putting user-friendliness anywhere near the top of their priority lists.
Mobility has made user-friendliness a key factor in the development of applications and it also acts as an accelerator for business processes. It has shifted the IT perspective from process-focused applications to user-focused applications.


1.4 Increasingly complex synchronisation
The early synchronisation provided to nomadic technicians was fairly limited in scope in the beginning. But the increasing ease with which users can download, upload and synchroni