In Step with the Changing Workforce Dynamics

Today, the role of mobile applications has broadened significantly with businesses considering ways to drive productivity and efficiency in the organization through enterprise apps. As the demand for business critical tools increases, it comes with the added baggage of incorporating these apps within the existing standards and policies of the organization so that optimum value can be derived from these mobile apps in changing the workforce dynamics.

An enterprise application is expected to be reliable, perform well, and provide an intuitive and efficient user interface. Enterprise applications ideally support multiple user access, developer, and component application that can handle large amounts of data and utilize extensive parallel processing, network distributed resources, and complex logic. It can be deployed across multiple platforms and inter-operate with many other applications with the requisite longevity. Its purpose is to meet specific business requirements-encode business policies, processes, rules, and entities developed in a business organization and deployed in a manner responsive to business needs. An enterprise application must be robust enough to sustain continuous operation. It must be extremely flexible for scalability and deployment while enabling efficient maintenance, monitoring, and administration.

The Mobile Workforce

In order to design an enterprise application, organizations must consider and balance an enormous array of application requirements such as the goals set by the organization, number of users it supports, the speed at which information has to be delivered among users, address budget constraints and ease of operations and the kind of security protocol required.

Enterprises are privy to the benefits of a mobile workforce and are constantly seeking newer avenues for development. As enterprises expand their work portfolio, the wide array of wireless products and services must also be able to support an expanded mobile workforce.

Enterprise applications are designed to integrate with other applications which are used within an organization that are deployed across a variety of networks (internet, intranet, and corporate networks), while following strict guidelines for security and administration management. Moreover with the emergence of private app stores it is important to ensure that the enterprise app store is integrated with the software license optimization solution for faster business decisions and streamlining expenses. This will provide end-user functionality demanded by users while still ensuring central accountability and control.

Analysts from Forrester Research expect the technology changes to disrupt long-held beliefs about the ownership and value of core enterprise application over the next 5 years, bringing in new levels of process flexibility and transparency-a transformation is expected to be driven through 7 main trends namely, software-as-a-service (SaaS), mobile, business process management (BPM), usability, platform-as-a-service (PaaS), social networks, and elastic computing.

Predictions

Enterprise mobility is going to change the way businesses operate with several businesses already developing and customizing their mobile sites to provide a better experience for the user. Moreover with enterprise applications evolving to suit the needs of the industry, analysts also predict that these apps will play an active role in defining the business processes, organizational structures and performance metrics within the IT organization of a company. Rapid growth of trends like mobile technology and app mean that they have to change keeping in mind user experiences; products should have rich graphical features that deliver business intelligence and interactive displays, thereby enabling decision-orientated activities and real-time customer interactions. The focus is changing from data capture to business outcomes, extending the application reach to a more diverse array of user roles. Adoption of enterprise based social networks as interactive platforms has in turn instigated enterprise technology suppliers to use this to their advantage and in turn assist business processes through integration of platforms.