4 challenges CIOs should consider while penning a mobile strategy

Divyesh Kharade

In an era where corporate are ruled by the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Bring Your Own Application (BYOA) or Carry Your Own Device/Application (CYOD/A), the entire IT organization is flummoxed with varying demands from employees across the board.

While the CIOs and their teams are burning mid-night oil developing mobile applications that suit the needs of different lines of businesses, here are four challenges they should bear in mind when penning a mobility strategy.

BYOD and native app development: Creating native apps across OSs like Android, iOS, Windows is expensive and development cost can run into $100,000 to $200,000 for a single app. Also the time to create these apps can take anywhere from 6-9 months and that’s really exhaustive considering the number of internal apps an enterprise would need.

Support and maintenance: Imagine rolling out five mobile apps and Apple upgrades to iOS 8.0 which requires a functional change and an app upgrade. Code level changes and redeploying the apps is a huge cumbersome process. This was just an instance, now imagine a scenario where the demand for upgrade is amplified 100s and 1000s of times as enterprises start scaling and deploying more apps.

Security: This is another big challenge with the single sign on, user authentication, user addition and deletion, content and data security playing a big part while deploying mobile apps that can be accessed anytime, anywhere.

Application management and upgrades With dynamic internal processes, workflows and upgrades, the mobile apps need to reflect the upgrades and changes real-time. The complexity only increases with multiple apps being deployed for different user groups.

These challenges seem very basic in nature, but not considered at the strategy level, can be the the root cause of a larger problem once an enterprise rolls out its enterprise mobility strategy across the spectrum.

The  author is co-founder, Drona HQ