When designing a mobile app we want to look for ways to account for the user’s context. This includes the person’s identity and location, travel speed, active apps, the weather, the task are they performing, gestures, sensor inputs, asleep or awake, etc.
Author Archives: Alan Street
IT Capability: Mobile Application and Device Management
Control of which server applications are available, how client apps are provisioned, which users and devices can access server applications, etc. Wiping of enterprise data from devices when needed.
IT Capability: Develop Systems of Engagement
Developing Omni-channel systems of engagement requires a number of subordinate capabilities:
- Designing and developing engaging user experiences across devices and touch points
- End-to-end architectures linking systems of engagement to systems of record, including data flows
- Designing for usability, dependability and scalability
- Instrument for deep analytics, including customer experience management
- Designing for privacy, deployment, management and security
- Adopting an agile development methodology.
Strategic Technology: API Gateway (Worklight)
With an API Gateway, mobile applications call REST interfaces which return data in JSON format. The API gateway integrates with other enterprise systems through Web Services, MOM, ESB, or point-to-point integration. The complexity and variation of the enterprise interfaces is hidden from the mobile applications, and the REST interfaces are published, so mobile apps may be composed quickly with standardized tools.
IBM’s API Gateway is the Worklight Server, included in IBM’s MEAP (Worklight).
Strategic Technology: Mobile Application Platform (IBM Worklight)
A Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) such as IBM Worklight provides the ability to write once and deploy anywhere.
IBM Worklight builds upon open source Apache Cordova (a.k.a. PhoneGap).
A MEAP provides tooling to develop mobile Web, hybrid mobile and native mobile applications. The IBM tooling for Worklight is named IBM Worklight Studio. Common code can be shared across applications of different types and targeted toward different devices. Support is provided for synchronization of data. Secure the application at the device, application and network layers, and govern the app portfolio.
Developers will need to integrate mobile application development tools with Web application development tools and lightweight Web development tools to provide multichannel systems of engagement.
A MEAP provides or depends upon mobile device/application management and mobile application security technologies.
- Mobile Application Management (MAM) enables deployment of applications through an enterprise app store, keeping them up-to-date on mobile devices, monitoring performance, and performing reporting, tracking and access control. MAM is supported by IBM Endpoint Manager for Mobile Devices.
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) enables tracking different versions of apps and improve them efficiently.
MQ messaging can be extended to mobile devices using IBM MessageSight.
Mobile app testing can be automated using IBM Rational Test Workbench.
IT Capability: Write Once, Deploy Anywhere
Engaging customers on an exploding number of wearables, phones, phablets, tablets, pc’s, televisions…and who knows what is next…drives fragmentation and inefficiencies in the application development and maintenance process.
Write once, deploy anywhere is a technique to manage this complexity by writing applications in a common technology that can be deployed to many devices. So instead of developing for…
- Objective C for iOS
- Java for Android
- C# for Windows mobile
…a team would develop once in Web technologies such as HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, along with a mobile platform that can create a platform-specific app.
IBM Worklight is an example of a Mobile application development platform.
IT Capability: Responsive Design
Responsive design is the practice of designing mobile applications such that they are displayed appropriately on different form factors. Responsive designs have a layout based upon percentages as opposed to numbers of pixels, and leverages enabling technologies such as fluid grids (formatting into columns) and media queries (CSS selection based upon device and orientation).
IT Capability: Agile Development and Continuous Delivery
Agile application development and continuous delivery are IT capabilities that allow project teams to respond to changing requirements resulting from a changing environment and insights, and release functional enhancements in rapid succession, whether it be to a formal test organization or production. Agile development supports continuous delivery. When I think of agile development I think about SCRUM as a project approach and supporting extreme programming techniques such as continuous integration, refactoring, and test-first design.
IT Capabilities: What Are They?
Capabilities are “Ability to…” statements that state the strategic requirements of an organization. I see them as existing within the organization’s strategy. Businesses require business capabilities such as the “Ability to protect client information”. These are supported by people, process and technology enablers. Enablers describe how the organization realizes these capabilities.
IT Capabilities are service capabilities within the IT group of the business. These are analogous to business capabilities, but are derived from strategic technologies. If a company needs an application scanning and testing technology to support the ability to protect client information, then they will also need people, processes and possibly even additional technology to support that technology.
IT capabilities are important to track as they must be built out as part of transformation projects.
Strategic Technology: Customer Experience Management (IBM TeaLeaf)
Gaining visibility to the quality of experience of customers and other users when using mobile and Web applications is an important step in learning about customers. Looking for excessive device rotations, zooms, abandonment, etc. can help identify and diagnose design weaknesses in applications so that they may be corrected before they spoil the experience of too many customers.
TeaLeaf is an IBM product that provides the Customer Experience Management (CEM) capability. For Web apps TeaLeaf scans HTTP traffic and provides a DOM listener. For native apps a library is compiled into the app.
CEM is a subset of CRM capability that is often of interest to marketing and customer support strategists.