Standardising your Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP)

MEAP vendors offering approaches that support mobile OS diversity have significant advantages over application suite or mobile OS platforms/tools in three situations: (1) when there are three or more applications; (2) when there are three or more targeted OSs or runtime platforms; and (3) when projects involve the integration of three or more back-end systems.

- Gartner’s ‘Rule of Three’ (2012)

To keep up with market demand, many big organisations have given business units the freedom to create and launch dozens or even hundreds of apps. While this has enabled business units, across markets, to get to market quickly innovative applications and benefit from the rapid return of investment, one year later the benefit of freedom has turned into a major challenge.

• Maintaining the applications with bug fixes, support of new devices and OS updates, ensuring that content is up to date, etc
• Keeping the apps up to date when backend platform, external service APIs and other integration points change
• Updating content from a myriad of content management systems, back office tools and admin interfaces
• Measuring and comparing applications equally to apply insights and learning’s from one initiative and apply for others
• Listening to user feedback on the app stores (or internally) and update the apps to keep users satisfied and engaged
• Inconsistency of brand and look and feel implementations
• Securing data (confidential and public), managing user authentication, traceability where logging is important

So what should organizations do to make their enterprise app portfolio manageable?

As originally stated by Gartner, any organisation planning on creating 3 or more enterprise class apps in the coming years should consider establishing a standardised Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP). Short term it may require a bit more work and investment but the investment will quickly pay off with:

• Faster speed to market and ease of keeping the applications up to date
• Lower cost of development and maintenance
• Enhanced business intelligence
• Data and user security
• Other benefits such as brand consistency, change management, CRM and system architecture.

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How to choose a MEAP solution

Once the requirements are clear there is a choice between choosing an existing platform and vendor, building one or possibly a hybrid of the two.

1. Existing Platform: There are various vendors out there although most are also tied into a specific backend supplier. Existing solutions include SAP Mobile Platform, IBM Worklight, KonyOne and GG/DMI Open MEAP. Most of them are primarily paper products as each implementation is 80% custom development, but provide a good starting point.

2. Creating a Custom Proprietary Platform: An alternative is to establish a standard framework based on a combination of best practice guidelines, tools and code that can be reused across the applications. Organisations such as MTV and ESPN have done this successfully over time.

3. Hybrid Model: The third option is to use an existing platform and customize it based on the organisations needs. This may be an especially great alternative if there are many common platforms and processes already and can be leveraged to create a standard for the applications as well.

What are the pros and cons of each model?

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Conclusion

Avoid worrying too much about the challenges of maintaining a portfolio of different applications and find the right MEAP solution for your organisation will deliver benefits from mobile enterprise applications in the short and long term.