seven secrets of building mobile apps that matter

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1 THE SEVEN SECRETS OF BUILDING MOBILE APPS THAT MATTER WHITE PAPER The power of mobile devices is incredibly alluring. The smartphones and tablets that we carry have the potential to transform the way enterprises do business. They can empower instant communications and collaboration, enable employees and customers to securely access vital information at any time and from any place, and extend mission-critical business processes far beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. But harnessing the potential of a smartphone or tablet requires a critical ingredient: mobile applications. And there’s a huge difference between trivial apps that go unused or fall short of their potential, and the mobile Apps that Matter—apps that truly engage customers, empower employees, and securely integrate with your enterprise data and systems to deliver real business impact. At DMI, we’ve built more than 1,500 mobile apps—400+ in the past year alone—for some of the world’s top brands and businesses. Now you can learn some of the secrets we employ when working with these industry leading organizations to build Apps that Matter. DMI MOBILE STRATEGY: THE SEVEN SECRETS OF BUILDING MOBILE APPS THAT MATTER

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Page 1: Seven Secrets of Building Mobile Apps that Matter

1THE SEVEN SECRETS OF BUILDING MOBILE APPS THAT MATTER WHITE PAPER

The power of mobile devices is incredibly alluring. The smartphones and tablets that we carry have the potential to transform the way enterprises do business. They can empower instant communications and collaboration, enable employees and customers to securely access vital information at any time and from any place, and extend mission-critical business processes far beyond the boundaries of the enterprise.

But harnessing the potential of a smartphone or tablet requires a critical ingredient: mobile applications. And there’s a huge difference between trivial apps that go unused or fall short of their potential, and the mobile Apps that Matter—apps that truly engage customers, empower employees, and securely integrate with your enterprise data and systems to deliver real business impact.

At DMI, we’ve built more than 1,500 mobile apps—400+ in the past year alone—for some of the world’s top brands and businesses. Now you can learn some of the secrets we employ when working with these industry leading organizations to build Apps that Matter.

DMI MOBILE STRATEGY:THE SEVEN SECRETS OF BUILDING MOBILE APPSTHAT MATTER

Page 2: Seven Secrets of Building Mobile Apps that Matter

2THE SEVEN SECRETS OF BUILDING MOBILE APPS THAT MATTER WHITE PAPER

DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #1: Consider the full scope of the project and assemble a winning team

Mobile apps are fun. Or at least they can be. It’s exciting to think about building a cool app to extend a business process to a mobile user or extend your brand to a customer in a new way. But diving in without considering the big picture and planning to do the job right can lead to real disappointment. Apps that don’t do what they should, apps that contain serious security flaws, apps that can’t be maintained, or just apps that are ignored can all result.

To avoid these pitfalls and build an App that Matters, consider the full scope of the project, from strategy to design, through development, testing and distribution, to analytics and management. Consider whether you have the skills in-house or if you should look for a partner to assist. Particularly when evaluating third party solution developers, consider the benefits of working with an organization that knows your industry and your customers. It’s best to find a developer who can truly partner with you to deliver an engaging user experience and seamlessly integrate with your legacy applications and data. You’ll need this to deliver the rich functionality that will set your app apart. Your team, whether in-house or third party, should have proven experience across the full spectrum below:

1. Strategy/Concept Determine objectives, target audience, strategy, platforms and concepts. Which platforms will you support? Should this be a native app or cross-platform? Develop clear use cases that define user behavior and functionality.

2. UE/Design Create wireframes, user journeys and designs optimized for the targeted mobile devices.

3. Development Choose technology and security approaches, including architectural requirements for back-end and social media integration, and develop the mobile apps/site across targeted platforms in iterations, allowing for testing throughout the process.

4. QA/Test Test the mobile app/site across the target devices with planned use cases.

5. Distribution Launch and submit the app to your own enterprise app store or, for public facing apps, stores like iTunes, Android Market, Getjar, Amazon, etc. Promote the app as appropriate to drive adoption.

6. Operations and Analytics

Monitor the performance of the app/site, maintain and update based on user feedback.

7. Management and Enhancement

Securely manage and monitor app access and use, apply security patches and upgrades as needed. Respond to security threats by locking, disabling or deleting apps and related data.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #2: Keep your development agile

Mobile app development can, and should, be far more nimble than typical enterprise application development projects. Ease of use is at the heart of a successful mobile app and it is impossible to capture it comprehensively at the requirement definition stage. An iterative approach will enable you to repeatedly refine functionality and user experience to arrive at a result that is better, more seamless, more functional and fun than an app that’s a product of a more structured, monolithic approach.

One of the secrets to an agile development approach is to agree with stakeholders on core functionality as early as possible and do early customer road testing. Once this is done, secondary functions can be developed. It’s also essential to maintain a continuous, transparent dialog between the development team and stakeholders—discussing the actual product—not just specifications. This dialog enables the development team to deliver the right product at the right time with exceptional quality.

An example agile development process is diagrammed below.

PRODUCT BACKLOG: The development process begins with an initial Product Backlog—a set of features and functionality to be delivered in the app.

SPRINT PLANNING MEETING: With the Product Backlog in hand, development proceeds in a series of sprints. In a Sprint Planning Meeting, the development team meets briefly to plan the steps and responsibilities for developing the first set of functionality.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

DAILY WORK CYCLE: The team establishes a daily work cycle that enables daily reviews of app functionality and design. This enables reviewers to experience the app as it is coming together. This ongoing involvement prevents development from going off course and often leads to joint discovery of user experience enhancements that could not have been envisioned at the start.

PRODUCT INCREMENT: The app is developed in increments. Each increment produces a new set of features, functionality or design that can be reviewed by the project owner.

SPRINT REVIEW: In the Sprint Review meeting, the development team demonstrates the work that has been completed and the functionality and design achieved, gathering feedback from the project owner and stakeholders.

SPRINT RETROSPECTIVE: After the Sprint Review, the development team conducts a brief Sprint Retrospective meeting, to learn from the Sprint and avoid repeating mistakes. The meeting ends with a list of action items that have been agreed upon and that will be implemented. Those changes may be added to the Product Backlog.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #3: Keep it secure

Keeping vital information safe and private data out of unauthorized hands when it’s everywhere, being accessed on thousands of smartphones and tablets, is a daunting challenge. And the mobile environment adds real complexity: How many different OSs do you have to secure? How many different devices? How will you keep apps updated and patched to head off the latest vulnerabilities? Just knowing how to approach these problems is a huge challenge, and while Mobile Security is a larger topic than Mobile App Security, some guidance is in order:

Start with the understanding that one size does not fit all. Different organizations, business functions, and users have different mobile security requirements. Some apps may require relatively little by way of security, but apps that access personal, financial, or other sensitive data will need tighter control.

Address the whole environment. For apps that handle sensitive information, security needs to be considered and applied pervasively. Infrastructure, devices, user authentication, network access, apps, app stores, physical security, device provisioning and management, and the soft aspects of security policy and governance all need to be considered.

Deploy the solutions that are right for you. A broad spectrum of protections can be applied to mobile apps. Multi–factor authentication, secure containers, mobile VPNs, and more are used to protect sensitive information. Even more sophisticated guidelines exist for protecting national security information (NIST FIPS 140-2, NIST SP 800-164, DISA’s Security Requirement Guides (SRC) for mobile operating systems (e.g., iOS, Android) and mobile device management, NSA’s Suite B encryption, etc.).

Make it practical. Making your mobile app security manageable, practical, and effective is important. Making it easy to monitor and enforce security policies, update configurations, and profiles and seamlessly re-provision devices is important for security that actually works.

Secret #4: If the user experience isn’t right, nothing is right

At its highest level, the team’s project approach needs to combine a clear understanding of project objectives and use cases, with elegant, attractive design, and iterative development. Developing your app will require a broad set of skills and roles: IT, Business Analyst, Developers, User Experience/User Interface (UI/UX) Designers, Quality Assurance/Testers, etc. All of these elements are critical; but it’s the design aspect of building successful mobile apps that is often beyond the experience and capabilities of most internal development teams.

In the mobile context, your organization’s apps will compete with tens of thousands of beautifully designed consumer applications and games. These attractive consumer apps have set high user expectations for apps that are fun to use, intuitive, and make seamless use of the built-in capabilities of the devices they run on. “Clunky” enterprise apps that don’t deliver a smooth, engaging, and delightful user experience quickly give rise to user exasperation and abandonment. It’s hard to justify the development cost of an app that users won’t touch.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #5: Beauty can’t just be skin deep

To be really useful, most mobile apps need to access enterprise data on demand from your back-end systems. Laying out a strategy to work seamlessly with back-end applications and data is essential. This could have different implications depending on what the application is being used for. For example, one app allows a repairman to receive a service call (ticket) pushed out (i.e. notification alert). Once the repairman acknowledges the alert and responds, a detailed map gets sent out. After doing the work, the repairman may need to enter the client’s credit card info for payment. Also, the repairman may need to send the info to ERP for parts used from inventory. Or, perhaps a consumer has signed up with a pharmacy to receive alerts for certain medications s/he is taking e.g. cholesterol, diabetes, etc... Once the reminder is received from the pharmacy app, the consumer then wants to use the app to order a refill and expects the app to send a notification when the refill can be picked up.

Both of these scenarios require significant back-end integration that needs to be thought through and planned for accordingly. Depending on architectural design, the implementation approach can have important implications from a user experience perspective. Furthermore, social media integration, which was once a consideration only for consumer apps, is now an important feature for many enterprise apps.

You can be sure that your first enterprise mobile app will not be your last. As mobile devices continue to grow in popularity and functionality, more enterprise mobile apps will need to be built. If you haven’t already, you may want to consider building a services-oriented enterprise architecture and a mobile middleware strategy that makes it easy to use and re-use enterprise data in multiple mobile apps.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #6: Track it

Once you’ve built your app, how will you know if it matters? Understanding the performance of the app/site (downloads, active users, time spent, etc) is key to understanding progress against the project objectives and to the improvement of application performance.

A number of options are available, including Google Analytics, Flurry, and Bango, as well as proprietary reporting tools or raw logging from the app of agreed activities.

Online tools for live tracking normally include:

Downloads and usage demographics (country, operator, device, etc.)

Usage by feature/function within the app

Trends in time and behavior

and more...

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DMI Mobile Strategy

Secret #7: Manage, Support, and Upgrade

Now you’ve successfully designed, developed, and deployed your mobile app. You’ve tested it thoroughly across multiple platforms and OSs. But nothing is going to stay static. Platforms and devices are continuously being updated and upgraded. Users, who have varying skills and familiarity with mobile devices, may need support. How will you provide the right level of post-deployment support? Do you have the right organization with the right breadth of skills to support and train the users? What about app enhancements? Depending on how your app is used, you may want to include a feedback mechanism for enhancement requests and other feedback.

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DMI Mobile Strategy

How DMI builds Apps that MatterDMI is the world’s leading provider of enterprise mobility services and solutions. We build enterprise class mobile solutions that generate results for the world’s top brands and businesses. Our mobile solutions combine the award-winning user experience design that has made us one of the top creators of consumer apps, with the deep middleware and engineering expertise that we’ve used to build and manage enterprise applications for the most demanding IT departments in the world. DMI mobility solutions improve business processes, tap new revenue streams, build customer loyalty, and increase employee productivity. And we offer a full range of Managed Services to securely set up, configure, and manage your mobile devices.

The proof:

We’ve built more than 400 mobile apps—in the past 12 months alone—for more than 150 leading organizations—like Disney, Coca-Cola, Toyota, Vodafone, P&G, The National Guard, and Universal Studios.

We offer brilliant creative and user experience: Our mobile app development group was named the Best Branded App Developer at the 2012 Mobile Entertainment Awards.

We are a Google Platform partner and Apple Consultant.

We have 500,000 devices under management for more than 100 clients, including many Fortune 500 companies—like BP, Johnson & Johnson, Sears, The Associated Press, Allergan, and more. At BP, we’re deploying 1,000 managed mobile devices each day.

We provide 24 x 7 x 365 mobile service support for more than 500,000 users. DMI is the one call our customers need to make to resolve any issue—devices, apps, infrastructure, and even carrier problems.

We offer a full range of security options that include Federal-grade hardware-based security, two-factor authentication, secure container, and sophisticated encryption solutions.

With our expertise and economies of scale, we can provide mobility management at a higher service level and on average 20% lower cost than most companies can do on their own.

Pervasive excellence is our commitment to quality service. DMI is one of only a handful of companies that is CMMI L3 appraised for both application development and services, as well as ISO 9001:2008, ISO 27001:2005, and ISO 20000-1:2011 certified. Our average D&B Open Ratings performance score from our clients is 94/100.

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