Systems development is different from mobile apps

Just about all businesses today want to deploy mobile apps and they want these apps developed in a very short time frame. Thats not so easy. Developing successful mobile apps poses some unique challenges. The user experience on a mobile device is fundamentally different from that on a PC. There are special features on mobile devices such as location-based services that give firms the potential to interact with customers in meaningful new ways. Firms need to be able to take advantage of those features while delivering an experience that is appropriate to a small screen. There are multiple platforms for mobile software, including iOS, Android, and Windows 10, and a firm may need a different version of an application to run on each of these as well as on devices of different sizes and capabilities. Mobile devices might be tiny and worn on the wrist or they might be large high-definition tablet displays. They might include sensors and audio output and even displays combining real and virtual images. System builders need to understand how, why, and where customers use mobile devices and how these mobile experiences change business interactions and behavior. You cant just port a website or desktop application to a smartphone or tablet. Its a different systems development process. Many enterprises require applications that link to corporate systems and function on the desktop as well as on mobile devices. Take, for example, Great-West Financial, the second largest retirement services company in the United States with approximately $461 billion in assets under its administration. Company employees spend more time serving customers in the field rather than in the office and needed a connection to the companys ERP Financials system from wherever they are work[1]ing to process accounts payable invoice approvals. Great-West decided to deploy the Dolphin Mobile Approvals app for this purpose. Great-West selected Dolphin because it could handle all of its SAP workflows in a single app, so that employees did not have to go to one place to approve invoices and another to approve everything else. Great-West configured the app to make its look and feel as similar as possible to the application users accessed on their desktops. The user sees the same data fields on the invoice header and line item on a mobile device as on a desktop computer screen, and the steps in the invoice approval process are the same. However, given the difficulty of jumping back and forth between different screens on a mobile device, the mobile app incorporates the necessary invoice approval codes into its line-item detail rather than displaying these codes on a PDF attachment. On a desktop, users must sign into the SAP system in order to see an invoice and will receive notification that an invoice is available for approval via email. A pop-up notification on the mobile app eliminates the need for users to log into the app before knowing about an invoice. Before deploying the mobile app, Great-West had to set up an appropriate mobile infrastructure, considering factors such as security, sign-on, and back-end integration. Since this was the companys first mobile app interfacing to the SAP system, the company had to make sure the mobile app could incorporate the entire workflow from the SAP system and that all the data was encrypted and secure. Great-West purchased 1,000 licenses for the mobile approvals app (which is compatible with both iOS and Android devices) and issued company-owned devices to senior executives and the heaviest invoice users. Remaining users are allowed to use the app on their own devices as long as they conform to the firms BYOD policy. For the past few years, United Parcel Service (UPS) has provided customers with a UPS Mobile app to track their shipments and obtain pricing information using smartphones and tablets. UPS developers initially wrote and maintained multiple versions of UPS Mobile, including one for iOS in Objective-C and another for Android in Java. This meant twice the work for UPS mobile developers. The different versions of the app might not be updated at the same time, so customers with different types of devices didnt always have access to the latest features at the same time. UPS was able to move the UPS Mobile app to a single development platform, but this entailed an enormous amount of work. The company selected Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin for this purpose because it allowed developers to share one C# code base across platforms and deliver fully native apps to customers. Xamarin also had better integration with mobile devices unique hardware and capabilities. Although UPS had to rebuild more than 130,000 lines of code that had been written over a four-year period, management realized that rewriting UPS Mobile would produce dramatic time and cost savings in the long run. The company went ahead with developing on a single platform. Much of the Xamarin code would need to be developed only once and it could support multiple platforms with great efficiency in the years to come. UPS mobile develop[1]ers rewrote all versions of UPS Mobile with Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin. UPS can now add a new feature across all mobile devices in weeks and days instead of months.

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS

1. What management, organization, and technology challenges need to be addressed when building a mobile application? 2. How does user requirement definition for mo[1]bile applications differ from traditional systems analysis? 3. Describe how Great-Wests invoice approvals process changed after the mobile application was deployed