Mobile App Development Isn’t So Specialized
In Truth in People's Hands: Designing Enterprise Systems for Mobile Timing and Distributed Responsibility, Brian Chavis, an enterprise systems architect with more than five decades of experience, assures CEOs that their own teams can handle most aspects of mobile development today. CRM editor Leonard Klie delved into this further with him.
CRM: Why do you say it is so much easier today to build mobile apps?
Chavis: Five or 10 years ago, building a useful mobile business application meant assembling a team of technical people with specialized skills, along with businesspeople to define the requirements and evaluate their work. This was time-consuming and expensive.
Today, many of the building blocks are already available. No-code platforms, APIs, automation, cloud services, and capabilities already built into our phones allow us to assemble working applications remarkably quickly.
That changes more than the cost of development. It means we can put a working prototype into the hands of the people who will use it and evaluate the business process before committing to the technical architecture. In other words, it has become much easier to find out whether an idea is worth building before doing the work.
CRM: What should be included in modern mobile apps?
A modern commercial app should make it easier for employees to do the work and for businesses to get better information sooner.
Employees want to reduce the administrative burden of reporting to enterprise systems. But they don’t want an entire corporate system reduced to a six-inch screen. They want the small piece of the enterprise that applies to the work they are doing at that moment, while taking advantage of the capabilities of the devices already in their hands.
Mobile apps can eliminate much of the manual data entry and reduce the need to return to a desk to access data screens, spreadsheets, emails, and reports.
The information should also flow in both directions. A field employee should be able to access the small amount of enterprise data needed to make a decision while standing in front of a customer, property, or piece of equipment.
CRM: What guardrails need to be incorporated in modern mobile app design, and what's the risk of not putting them in place?
Mobile applications can move an observation to a business action almost instantly. That’s their great advantage, but it's also their risk. Actions involving money, external systems, multiple records, or irreversible consequences need controls around sequencing, authorization, duplicate prevention, failure recovery, and auditability.
The challenge in modern mobile design is to put the right guardrails back in the right places without recreating the friction that mobile was intended to eliminate.
CRM: What role, if any, can/should AI play in mobile app design?
Most mobile development frameworks now have AI capabilities that can generate rudimentary applications. These will certainly improve, but for the foreseeable future I see them primarily as another way to get a developer to the prototype stage. I would not yet turn over the architecture of a commercial application to AI.
AI has been valuable when I reach the boundaries of the mobile platform and need to extend the application into other systems. Even for a seasoned programmer, connecting a mobile application to APIs, automation platforms, cloud services, mapping systems, and other external technologies can be a minefield. That might be AI's most valuable role in application development: It dramatically expands the range of technologies with which an experienced developer can practically work.
CRM: Once the app is done, who should be responsible for maintaining/updating it?
This is ultimately a business decision, and it depends on the organization. In my own work, I can hand an application over to the client and their internal staff can maintain it. One of the advantages of modern no-code platforms is that the application does not necessarily require a specialized mobile development team to maintain it.
CRM: What is the one message you want readers to take away from this book?
The most valuable operational truth often exists at the moment something happens, in the hands of the person who is actually there. For too long, we have allowed that truth to travel through emails, spreadsheets, meetings, and manual processes before it finally reaches our enterprise systems. By then it might be incomplete, out of context, or simply too late to be useful. Modern mobile technology can change that. We can capture information at the point of observation and move it into the business while it can still make a difference.