Mobile App
Strategy
January 2015
This white paper explores how, with this
continually evolving digital era, mobile
strategy can help companies to
embrace new ways of working in order
to drive change.
Introduction
3
Why mobile?
4
Identifying avenues of opportunity
4
Roadmapping
7
Capabilities required to exploit mobile
10
Technical Considerations: Back-end Platforms as a Strategic Capability 13
Frameworks
15
Business obstacles: Governance, Budgets and Ownership
16
Other Considerations
17
Conclusions
18
Introduction
Mobile Strategy enables companies to adapt to the evolution of business technology, providing them with a competitive
advantage that can see companies leapfrog ahead of
competitors. Companies who are successful with mobile generally see huge improvements to their internal operations, as well as improved engagement and brand perceptions externally. With this continually evolving digital era, mobile strategy helps companies to embrace new ways of working in order to drive change.
Mobile Strategy could be described as problem-solving for business transformation. Through utilising business analysis, applied models and a defined process, companies are able to define their digital landscape and prioritise opportunities through creating roadmaps. The integrated nature of strategy, which includes technical infrastructure and user experience, means companies can confidently approach the challenge of mobile with a clear vision of simple first steps, alongside plans for a wider rollout of mobilised services.
When considering a mobile strategy, organisations typically consider one or more of the following three questions:
1. What are the opportunities for mobile to enhance the business?
2. What is required from IT and the rest of the organisation to get the most out of mobile opportunities?
3. To what extent should mobile be utilised internally and externally?
In addition to answering these questions, a mobile strategy will also seek to provide insight into how firms can approach their mobile roadmap. This includes how the roadmap should be assembled and which project(s) should be tackled first.
This white paper will specifically focus on mobile apps and the associated ecosystem. It isn’t designed to be a guide to policies and practices of using devices, such as Bring Your Own Device or Mobile Relationship Management.
Why mobile?
Mobile has become one of the easiest ways for companies to achieve business goals, by providing a true computer in the pocket. As mobile devices have become faster and more
powerful, whilst also more affordable, companies are able to take advantage of the key attributes of mobility, such as: Immediacy, location-awareness (including micro-location), contextual information, convenience, actionability and always with you; to help achieve business objectives.
Smart devices are the Swiss Pocket Knife of the enterprise, combining a range of other technologies to provide a camera, compass, gyroscope, mobile broadband hotspot, GPS, NFC, biometric scanners and other sensors. This technology also enables easy integration with services such as social networks, cloud services, collaboration tools and backend systems. They all create possibilities for new experiences and connections.
With mobile established as a distinct remit within some leading enterprises, CIOs and product teams are now applying mobile strategy to both support and evolve how they do business.
Identifying avenues of opportunity
Categorising and mapping known opportunities is a useful prelude to roadmapping. To do this, it’s important to identify potential opportunities more thoroughly. Successful companies will start by thinking through the needs of different groups of stakeholders in relation to mobile and mobility. This will identify routes to benefit the business directly or indirectly.
Generally, this process should begin by thinking about the business’ four main audiences:
1. Customers: These apps are focused on improving customer service efficiency, brand engagement, access to information, manage accounts, make payments, sell or buy products, in addition to numerous other use cases.
2. Employees: These types of apps are focused on solving line of business issues, such as field force efficiency, admin reduction and providing real-time customer relationship management via integration with SalesForce or other tools. Many companies are using employee facing tools to provide executives with
Business’ Four
Main Audiences
Customers
powerful dashboards that help them make decisions whilst on the move, or provide them with information they need, helping to reduce email communication.
3. Partners: These apps focus on process standardisation to provide both the partner and organisation with better oversight of the supply chain; process integration to reduce paper processes and location assurance for better granularity and control.
4. Stakeholders: Mobile apps can provide stakeholders with the content they require and updates on business activity. Often, they will be focused on stakeholder communication to provide a centralised, accessible information portal.
With each of these, it is important to look at what is currently happening across the organisation to find out how different groups currently use mobile. This can be done by:
Asking stakeholders
Finding the avenues of opportunity often comes from talking to employees, customers or other stakeholders. Many employees may already have found their own ways to be productive and access what they need, even if the company hasn’t approved it.
Analyse online behaviour
One of the other wake up calls for a number of companies, over the past few years, has been the dramatic rise in traffic from mobile devices to websites. Utilising these analytics can be useful to companies for a number of reasons. Firstly, it shows which devices are the biggest priority. Secondly, it may reveal which part of the website mobile users are trying to access. Thirdly, it can show the current bounce rate from mobile.
Align mobile strategy with business objectives
Mobile shouldn’t be thought of in isolation. As it impacts so many parts of the business, instead, it should be thought about as a tool to help achieve the overall business strategy. It’s important to assess company objectives and explore where mobile fits in. This involves assessing if there are particular objectives in relation to brand engagement and customer or employee experience or advocacy.
Partners
Have mobile champions
Central to all of this is the level of management support and funding made available for driving improvements. If there is no-one at a senior level who champions mobilisation, projects may fail to get off the ground. Education is often required to help show the benefits mobile can bring.
Assess the processes which can be mobilised
Businesses have multiple audiences across their organisations. They have partners, employees, customers and investors, all accessing or inputting data on a daily basis, forming the core processes of the organisation. Typical business drivers for mobility, common across sectors, tend to focus on replacing paper-based processes or introducing self-service.
Analyse the pain points
A significant opportunity mobility can bring is through joining-up processes across the organisation, for example allowing one group of users (e.g. customers) to report issues and another (e.g. field technicians) to use that information. It is the creation of this kind of connection between groups that can drive the
transformation of businesses, and potentially a whole sector.
Assess the predicted knock on effects
The use of mobile devices can also generate a wealth of data about specific user groups. This can be of use to organisations, whether in real-time, for profiling, or in aggregate, so the benefits of mobility can extend far beyond the users’ experience.
Sector analysis and benchmarking
When it comes to thinking about the roadmap, activities include profiling who the target users are and what their pain points are - these may also have been identified as business issues during the discovery phase. It can be the case that slightly different user experiences may be appropriate for different groups.
When looking for opportunities, it's important to ask key
questions: What is it that different groups tend to complain about at the moment? Are there groups which appear to be under-performing? Asking these types of questions can often reveal interesting insight. Is there a particular process that causes delays to operations? If this could be improved, it is a good candidate for prioritisation.
Outside of this, it’s also important to perform sector analysis and benchmarking to generate ideas; starting by analysing competitor activity, especially around their activity on digital and mobile channels.
Case study: S&D Sealants is a UK based family run business with a 40 year history. The firm had a team of sealant applicators across the country who would go out to building sites to apply sealant. At each site, they would assess sites and call an administrator to provide job information to receive job costings. Work carried out would then be written down on paper and sent to one of S&D’s regional offices for processing.
S&D had the objective of doubling its revenue through meeting increasing demand from customers. By creating a bespoke app, based around S&D’s process, S&D was able to reduce the amount of time it took to process an invoice from a week down to five minutes, massively reducing the stresses on the admin team. As a result of this, S&D has already seen a significant increase in monthly income from one client, allowing S&D to grow its field team and grow the business.
Roadmapping
The roadmap – and there may be several – organises the
identified opportunities into a logical sequence. Understanding of dependencies is critical, especially since there may be technical infrastructure developments needed to support user-facing projects, such as apps. Generally the key question is which project should be tackled first, or at least next?
There are three clear options, as described below. Which one, or combination, is appropriate will depend on the business
environment and drivers.
Start with the easiest.
Perhaps the obvious choice, the benefit of starting here is that it provides an opportunity to gain experience with the least risk of complications or possible failure. It provides an opportunity to show success, with delivery likely to be relatively fast. This is the project that is likely to require the least resources, so could be the easiest to fund and to get approved.
On the other hand this choice could be seen as unambitious and success may not provide credibility for the rest of the roadmap where harder challenges can be seen in advance. As the easiest, this could also deliver the least potential value to the organisation. As a result, it could hinder projects which are more critical to operations.
Start with the most complicated.
If there is a sense in which the vision requires a number of elements working together, it can make sense to tackle the hardest part first. If this part can be delivered, then the business can be confident that the vision is achievable. It may be possible to resource this part with a short-term ‘A-Team’ which can solve the key problems, leaving other projects to be delivered by regular staff.
There may be a clear risk of failure upfront, which could be mitigated through a staged approach.
Start with the most important.
This could be the one with the highest overall impact, or the most urgent.
The benefits of this choice include the fastest benefit to the overall business and if there is a major ‘burning platform’ (such as the need to close a significant gap on a competitor) this would make sense. It may also be the easiest to get business approval and funding for, so that strategic elements would, in effect, be funded by this project. This could be the one with the highest overall impact, or the most urgent.
The downside is again the risk of failure, whole or partial. It may be that the impact of a poor execution (for example in a
customer-facing app) is greater than the impact of non-delivery. Expectations of key stakeholders should be considered and managed appropriately; adequate business-readiness checks should precede any launch.
As part of this process, it’s important to focus on what a company wants to achieve, and how closely they align with overall business objectives. Key performance indicators (KPIs) help to establish which routes may be the best to explore first for maximum value. It is these KPIs that should be measured and assessed throughout the process and delivery of any apps. Measuring this will help to
show the return the app has for the business, whether it is improving customer service, improving field efficiencies or cost savings.
A number of mobile strategy tools have been developed to aid with discovery and plotting of mobile opportunities, the following images illustrate the process involved:
The roadmap should also be used to show how different apps and services link together to provide maximum value, in this sub-section, the paper will explore some of the considerations that need to be taken.
Capabilities required to exploit
mobile
A single app can generally be created with minimal impact on an organisation. A single team usually ‘owns’ the app and any connectivity requirements can be provided as bespoke for the app. Once a wider use of mobility services is considered, organisational-wide capabilities need to be developed.
In our experience, the consequences of failing to consider these capabilities, before the creation of multiple apps include some, or all of the following:
• Siloed creation of apps: This results in inconsistencies of look and feel and a mix of in-app user experiences. Apps are unlikely to work together. Consequently the overall user experience is suboptimal and the brand is negatively impacted.
• No roadmap or funding for updates and developments: This results in apps going stale, receiving poor ratings. If
functionality breaks, it will remain that way until fixed.
• Technical complexity: Without a technical strategy, systems of ‘spaghetti’ can develop with many tactical solutions implemented. Part of this involves looking at the services available and how data will get to and from mobile devices. Often, APIs will need to be created to integrate backend systems with mobile apps.
• Security and other technical issues: If standards and procedures are not established, there can be compliance issues resulting in security and structural vulnerabilities. Poor documentation can also lead to support problems.
• High costs and long development times: If the basics are being re-done for each new app, or the basic foundations for mobilisation are not in place, this will inevitably impact on the delivery schedules.
As part of the roadmapping process, it’s often important to assess the best route to mobilise key operations. Many companies with internal IT teams may want to keep development in-house, however, with the various elements that need to be created, a collaborative approach can lead to the best results. The following section discusses each of these approaches:
Internal Resourcing
With mobile’s established strategic importance for organisations, many are building out their internal IT teams with mobile
developers to handle development or maintenance in-house. Developing mobile apps internally will provide cost savings in the long term; the business will have more control over projects and involve internal experts with in-depth knowledge of the business; and there will be more flexibility to accommodate further
development.
While the benefits to organisations are vast, if they are building teams with strong capabilities, partnering with other technology companies can still be important for these teams. Working with external companies to better understand new innovative
technologies and how they can be used across the business is often still a requirement.
Also, by the very nature of internal projects, the approach and internal processes may slow delivery times down; and therefore external resource may be employed for more urgent or
specialised projects.
Outsource resourcing
Outsourcing can come with obvious benefits to firms. Firstly, it provides a fast way for companies who lack in-house capabilities to deploy apps. Due to the wide breadth of mobile platforms and coding languages, it’s often rare for developers to have
experience across all platforms. Creating apps requires experts in different fields, from UI and UX to front-end and back-end
development.
Secondly, by working with a company who has expertise in mobilising business processes and operations, companies can benefit from learnings from other sectors. By creating projects internally, companies may not be able to think outside of their own expertise.
Outsourcing development can come with its own set of
challenges; including integrating modules, whether they are SDKs, APIs, or other components that have been developed by in-house teams, third party providers or the outsourced development partner. Most often, this is a case of external parties not having
software. This can result in external teams spending longer trying to understand proprietary software, which can add to costs.
One consideration with outsourcing, is for firms to decide conclusively what they want upfront, for the whole project, or face the costs of making changes later down the line. This is a challenge that also impacts in-house led development, as there will be a project manager with milestones to stick to. One
advantage of doing this in-house, is that firms can work in an agile way, though this can lead to delays.
Collaboration
One of the major constraints to internal IT teams, in respect of developing an app, whether native or web based, is whether the particular skill set and experience is available within internal teams. Unless companies have developers with specific expertise in mobile language - HTML5, Java, Objective-C, C# or C++, firms can sometimes struggle to create apps in-house.
It’s understandable why companies would want code to be in a language internal teams are familiar with. Firms with internal IT departments often want to be able to maintain apps they have deployed. This can help with lifetime costs, if firms can utilise existing resource. Though, this approach can lead to problems, as developing mobile apps is unlike creating desktop or backend systems.
When creating apps, experience is key. Apps need to be designed to be as battery efficient as possible. Many variables need to be considered in order to create an app that is easy to use, delivers meaningful value to the user (by making their job easier) and is designed for future compatibility.
Often, internal teams won’t have the required skills for the app element of creating mobile projects. What they do often have however is the ability to create the backend services and systems to enable mobility. This is when a collaborative approach can be a mobile project dream.
However, it is often not only the development aspect of the project which external resource can be useful for. Depending on the skills and requirements of internal resource, partnering with niche app development and mobile experts can help fill the gaps.
Where organisations have adequate development expertise, the necessary skill set for developing engaging user experiences and user interfaces may not be supported internally. Therefore involving external design resource may be necessary.
Collaboration is key between internal teams to find the right opportunities and priorities for mobilisation. It’s also important, throughout projects, to involve the target stakeholders and end-users to ensure projects deliver value to them and that their needs are taken into account to deliver the best possible end product.
To get the best out of a collaborative approach, it’s important to work closely so everyone understands the internal expertise, who is going to be involved and with whom decision making lies. Planning for how to work collaboratively is essential to clarify the roles everyone will play and to put proper feedback processes in place.
Technical Considerations: Back-end
Platforms as a Strategic Capability
A number of companies have spent the past few years building out Application Programmable Interfaces (APIs), to allow for seamless integration. To help with this, there are tools and platforms available that easily create APIs, with the associated documentation, which companies can use when creating APIs, if they aren’t already available. When companies do have APIs available, it’s important to test them for mobile to ensure the right data gets to apps securely and robustly.APIs enable companies to quickly build tools for mobile that help employees, the supply chain or consumers to engage with the company. This approach is known as being ‘API-Centric’. Some organisations, particularly in the public sector, start their mobility journey by opening up their systems and data so that developers can create apps and other interfaces; as an ‘API-first’ approach.
In order to facilitate such APIs, a ‘middleware’ solution is usually needed. As the name suggests this is a platform which serves as a bridge between existing ‘back-end’ systems and interfaces, such as mobile apps and websites. This may provide an entirely
Management Systems (CMSs) which gather content from the back-end and hold it ready for the apps.
Once the strategic roadmap for mobility has been set, typically the technical architecture of the solution would start with looking at the available APIs to discover where gaps in the system are, providing insight as to how to overcome them.
This API definition starts with knowing how the end data should look on a device and at the backend. Once this has been done, it’s possible to work backwards from the intended user experiences and perform gap analysis.
At this stage, external system requirements will be assessed, with dependencies identified such as the potential CMS and, or
middleware requirements to design the target technical architecture.
The roadmap for constructing the technical capabilities can be planned accordingly, plotted alongside the strategic roadmap. A number of options are generally available for hosting and
managing the middleware and the appropriate solution can change as the roadmap progresses. For example a low-risk third-party hosted approach can be appropriate initially, with the intention to bring the middleware in-house, once a certain level of usage is achieved.
There is a wide ecosystem of services and elements that need to be thought about when mobilising enterprise systems. During the strategic planning of apps, it will be important to assess the options available to create apps in a way that makes the most amount of sense for the organisation to achieve end goals.
Frameworks
For many aspects of app development, common standards can be beneficial. These help to ensure that the apps adhere to any central policies, such as for security, and that there is consistency for areas such as the customer experience and the management information provided. Such frameworks can be regarded as an investment, which take effort to implement, but payback
commercially as well as operationally. Relevant areas to consider include the following:
• Security Guidelines: Employees increasingly using third party apps for work tasks. This poses obvious security risks for businesses as corporate data is exposed to third-parties.
Frameworks need to be put in place for deciding upon the best route to protect this data, whilst still providing employees with what they need. This may be a custom solution, or utilising systems that provide private, locally hosted enterprise storage. In the case of local storage, this may still be defined as a cloud based solution that is hosted within the company’s country of operation.
• Design Guidelines: These would cover each Operating System platform and detail what is standardised in the look and feel. The design guidelines would also need to cover the corporate look and feel, to ensure there is consistency across apps, should outsourced companies be involved in the creation.
• User Interface Kit: Further to Design Guidelines, a ‘UI kit’ can be developed, containing standard elements or modules, unique to the organisation. These can be incorporated into developments as appropriate to ensure consistency across apps.
• Coding standards: This can include the use of standard libraries, to ensure optimal performance and cost effectiveness, as well as defining documentation standards. Aspects of the Security Guidelines may be included in this area.
• 3rd Party Systems: To offer the most value and deliver the best results, apps often require integration with third party libraries and tools; these might include MDM, Push, Payment handling, hosting, cloud services, productivity tools (such as Office 365) or analytics. For usability and commercial reasons the choice of these should be standardised within a framework, across an organisation.
• Support arrangements: Support should be appropriate to the
Frameworks for
App Development
Security Guidelines
Design Guidelines
User Interface Kit
Coding Standards
3rd Party Systems
Support Arrangements
and user-experience efficiencies.
• App Technology Choices: Defining which type of app (native, wrapped, hybrid or using a 3rd party tool) is appropriate is an important choice in development. However, it can impact on support and roadmap development if the technology becomes fragmented, so consistency in app technology choice is also important.
• KPI tracking and analytics: Mobile apps should have
performance indicators created as part of their business case. Across an organisation it is important that KPIs are set and measured consistently and, where appropriate, that they can ‘feed into’ a wider management information system regime.
Creating apps using frameworks is generally seen as taking a platform approach, which increases efficiency. New initiatives can be rapidly turned around, with relatively low risk and cost through this approach.
Business obstacles: Governance,
Budgets and Ownership
As a minimum, an organisation should put in place a governance model to prioritise mobile project requests, based on the business benefits. As well as topics such as budget and portfolio fit,
governance may also cover management decisions such as the App Quality Strategy (i.e. Risk Appetite).
As with any interface – whether customer-facing or internal – a mobile app needs to sit ‘properly’ in the organisation. Ownership is needed in both ‘the business’ and the technology areas.
Ownership should be assigned for ongoing maintenance and development, which include appropriate budgets.
Ideally the app approval process should include ring-fencing of budget lines for maintenance (i.e. Opex) and for development (i.e. future Capex). Non-development activities should also be
considered. For example, for an internal app there may be a set of change management activities necessary for success and these might be controlled by HR. In this case, if HR is not resourced appropriately, the business benefits of the app may not be realised – however good the app is.
App Tech Choices
KPI Tracking and Analytics
The governance should also ensure that there is a regular flow of end-user feedback and that this is utilised to ensure the app is being fully optimised to the users’ needs.
Other Considerations
Dependent on the type of app being created, there are a number of other considerations that companies need to think about.
A new app will often create a new communication channel, particularly if it is external facing. Content will need to be created and refreshed; this content is distinct from that required for a website or other channels. Hence resourcing of the content creation and management can be a critical factor in the success of the app.
For a consumer-facing app, app marketing is an important extension to the online marketing function. App stores or
marketplaces are the main channels people use to search for and buy their apps, but there are also ways to discover apps through mobile search. Mobile search usage is growing and marketers need to incorporate this into their overall app marketing strategy. As well as searching on phones while on-the-go, consumers are increasingly searching on their mobile browsers at home.
Using Google AdWords, as an example, there are a number of extensions available to enhance ads. The type of extensions available will depend on whether you are targeting the desktop or the mobile. With mobile-specific ads one can include clickable phone numbers and location extensions, as well as links that direct users to download the app. These are called click-to-download ads and are a brilliant way to drive consumers towards an app. It’s equally important for businesses and brands to optimise their app store listings for visibility in organic search, which in turn will drive more people to download the apps.
The skills required for app marketing are an extension of those familiar to online marketeers; the additional capacity required should be considered as part of the mobile strategy execution plan.
Conclusions
Developing a strategic roadmap, that is core to achieving business strategy, requires careful consideration and involving key
stakeholders.
Strategy is less about the planning behind a single app, but instead the entire mobility roadmap and how apps fit into this, based on specific audience requirements. The first step involves looking at the backend to see what is available, what needs to be built and how to best optimise for the mobile user; be it on a phone, tablet or wearable.
Forward thinking companies have spent the past few years building out APIs, to allow for seamless integration. To those working in mobile, it should come as no surprise that the company at the forefront of this is Coca Cola. The organisation has created hundreds of APIs that are for both public and internal use.
This enables Coca Cola to quickly build tools for mobile that help employees, the supply chain or consumers to engage with Coca Cola. As mobile devices continue to proliferate and change in form, to include wearables, Coca Cola will be able to adapt to changing demands and trends. Companies, like Coca Cola, who build the right foundations can easily develop and progress their mobile strategies by responding to demand and opportunities.
When approaching mobility, to make improvements to operations and processes, it’s important to approach it with commercial needs and user gains at the centre of activity. Any activity needs to be linked to what success means to your organisation and think about what objectives need to be achieved.
There is a realisation that apps are best when they enable the user to complete a task, whether it is for entertainment,
communication or productivity. Apps need to be useful to the end user, whether they are a customer, partner, employee, investor or other stakeholder. They need to offer a service that isn’t easily offered through other channels, such as the web, to make life easier for the user.
To sum up the approach to mobile strategy, here are six main steps that you can take today:
1. Start by identifying core business objectives and the
company’s mobile vision. User needs will need to be explored by looking at internal and external processes, communications and the service proposition.
2. Identify opportunities where processes can be made more efficient, where the process or interaction could be enriched. The most powerful way to achieve this is by looking at where new or joined up processes could be created through mobile to effect business transformation and improvements.
3. Map out opportunities for mobile solutions that are aligned to the strategic objectives of the business. Opportunities may then be phased and a roadmap created.
4. Define the KPIs you’ll measure and report on, to understand success. This will show what the return on mobility will be. You’ll need a business case to demonstrate the value of mobile initiatives. If it is a consumer app, you’ll also need to think about budget for marketing your app. Don’t forget to first measure what is happening today in your pre-mobile world, so you can demonstrate how customer behaviours change as a result of mobile deployments.
5. Identify any business obstacles that lie in your path and herd resources towards a joined-up mobile vision, using a clear implementation plan. Explore if small technical advances are possible – remember it’s easier to justify larger scale
transformation once you’ve proven an initial test.
6. Identify a partner that has experience in building apps for large companies who can deliver tangible value through mobility. They should be able to address not only the snazzy front-end design and development, but also the tricky back-end integration. What’s more, they should also be able to contribute to your strategy by helping you quantify the
financial, legal and customer benefits of rolling out these types of apps, to make the business case to develop the app.
White paper written by Mubaloo:
Mubaloo is the UK’s leading enterprise mobile consultancy and app developer. Over the past six years, Mubaloo has helped companies to refine their operations and re-engineer processes that drive improvements to the ways in which different
workers, customers and other user groups. This means that users now have an even playing field in terms of what they can do. By approaching mobility from a strategic perspective, it’s possible to utilise the devices that people use to drive business benefits and improve the ways in which companies operate and end users engage.
To find out how mobile could help your organisation visit
www.mubaloo.com or email [email protected] for more information.
