4 challenges CIOs need to consider for creating mobile apps

In this connected world, the current trend in companies is mobilizing internal apps, processes and workflows. CIO teams are flush with demands from different functions like sales, marketing, HR, operations, finance or other CXOs on different mobile applications ranging from apps driving productivity to efficiency or even simple information dissemination or dash-boarding apps.

But creating internal mobile apps is a complex proposition mainly because of the following four challenges:

#1 BYOD and native app development: Creating native apps across basic OSes like Android, iOS, Windows and Blackberry is expensive and can run into 100-200K USD depending on the complexity of the app and that’s just the cost of a single app. Also the time to create these apps can take anywhere from 6-9 months and that’s really exhaustive considering the amount of internal apps any enterprise would have.

#2 Support and maintenance of the apps: Imagine rolling out 5 mobile apps and Apple upgrades to iOS 8.0 with critical upgrades which requires a functional change and an app upgrade. Code level changes and redeploying the apps and everything is a huge cumbersome process. Now imagine this being amplified 100s and 1000s of times as enterprises start scaling and deploying more apps.

#3 Enterprise grade security: This is another big challenge with the single sign on, user authentication, user addition and deletion depending on the employee status, content and data security playing a big part in deploying mobile apps that can be accessed everywhere.

#4 Application management and upgrades:  With dynamic internal processes, workflows and upgrades the mobile apps need to reflect the upgrades and changes real-time. The complexity only increases with multiple apps being deployed for different group of users across different OSes. A single upgrade in itself is a major task, imagine doing this day in and day out with 1000s of other apps.