Many companies may not realize that a mobile strategy may begin with the mobile workforce but ultimately apply to the entire workforce.

This trend is being fueled by the convergence of desktops and laptops into tablet like devices that operate untethered.  Also, the genetics of genuinely mobile apps is vastly different than desktop applications — quick, context sensitive, simple features with little navigation make efficient and attractive apps for mobile and tablet users.

Companies need to invest wisely in toolsets that deliver immediate value in the mobile workforce, but allow for future growth across the entire workforce subject to the points made above. The toolset should be very secure, allow for BYOD, not discriminate among the top device vendors, take real advantage of native device sizes and features, and support centralized deployment, authorization, revocation, and maintenance of applications.

Finally, because the benefits of mobile and tablet computing will vastly increase the number of applications, enterprises must ensure that their toolset can scale to the number of projects that will be needed to satisfy their users.

I’m an enterprise Java architect who’s been using functional programming techniques for the past several years. The majority of my experience has been with Scala and Akka with the occasional use of Lisp and Standard ML. I thought I would step back and offer an encouraging perspective to other Java veterans for when they realize that functional programming is a necessary paradigm for the future. For many veterans, I’ll simply remind them that they have already weathered the adoption of a major programming paradigm: object-oriented.

Object-oriented techniques are a foregone conclusion in this day and age of programming.  But it wasn’t always so. There was a time when meetings were consumed with discussions of OO methodologies and the virtues of inheritance, composition, encapsulation, and polymorphism. I look back on that period of adoption as a necessary purification by fire.  Embedded in all the chaos were some great OO techniques that needed to find their place in mainstream development. I think it is safe to say that the greatest contribution of OO technology is the ability to reduce complexity by creating meaningful abstractions over problem domains, which was always the promise of OO. But again, it took a while to realize the promise.

Like object-oriented, functional programming techniques will soon be a foregone conclusion. We are currently coming to terms with the notions of immutability, algebraic techniques, monads, actors, and reactive programming. At the core of this cacophony of ideas and terms is once again a promise of reducing complexity. Whereas object-oriented helped us reorganize our systems into meaningful structures of data and procedures, the functional promise is that we can reorganize our systems into parallel systems of enormous scale that “flow” together reliably. Taming the complexity of enormous scale is an absolute requirement before enterprise architectures can fully capitalize on the economics of multi-core processors, virtualization, and the cloud.

Finally, I would like to say that functional programming is in addition to object-oriented, and it is in this light that I can say that my experience in Scala and Akka has been rewarding.  Sure, there are bumps in the road and there is certainly a learning curve, but that’s because learning is in the way of productivity. The best thing that any programmer can do is roll up his sleeves and dive in. The learning curve isn’t the language, it’s the new levels of abstraction that must be mastered in order to build reliable systems for tomorrow.  Your hard work will be rewarded.

The demand for mobility in the marketplace is in its early stages still, and currently many organizations are grappling with many different approaches to deploying mobile applications to their workforce. The struggle currently is to create high-performance, secure, native applications that have that level of elegance and aesthetic appeal that is on par for consumers. Consumer applications have set the bar high.

But this doesn’t mean that the traditional approach that is working for consumer applications today is working or will ever work for the enterprise. It also doesn’t mean that aesthetic and user experience standards should be lowered for the enterprise. What is needed is a fresh approach to development: a social approach where the people that know the enterprise data the best work with employee end users to create the most efficient and productive user experience possible.

This social enterprise app development process derives its efficiency from rapid, iterative changes by removing the lengthy design, testing and traditional QA practices. Let’s examine the scenario of a sales rep being presented with a new app that helps them with their daily routine. The sales rep finds the app helpful but sees something missing from the app, and decides that it’s time to contact the app team to request a change. The traditional development process would look something like this:

Looking at this development cycle from the pure ROI standpoint exposes that it is simply not efficient or sustainable. Not only is this change process painfully slow, it uses numerous highly skilled resources whose work would probably be better spent elsewhere. This cost is further exasperated if integration to large ERP systems, business logic and enterprise software is required.

Let’s compare that process to a new, rapid, iterative, social approach:

Social enterprise mobile app development brings the end user together with the super user or app administrator in order to shorten feedback cycles and maximize efficiency. Fueled by a hybrid cloud environment in which applications can be easily modified, and where the UI and functionality is orchestrated, change cycles can be drastically decreased. An app change that might take four to six weeks using the traditional approach can be accomplished in less than one day or one week using the social approach.

You can probably infer by now how ROI is improved due to less project time and resource usage. The true benefits however may be less tangible or obvious:

• Employee end user satisfaction and productivity increase as a result of quicker changes and responsiveness.
• With this new efficient process, IT moves from a reactive position to a proactive leadership and innovation position within the organization as they help to quickly deliver real productivity gains to employees.
• The relationship between employee end users and IT improves as they are no longer separated by the chasm of an inefficient change process and bureaucracy.

The social app development process has the chance to break the all-consuming traditional development cycles that are in place in most organizations today. Maximize ROI for sure, but in the meantime, make all employees happier and more productive.

To help illustrate this point we have put together an ROI calculator for you to use on your own scenarios.  You can give it a try here: http://www.catavolt.com/roi/

For consumers, mobility’s growth was fueled by the creation of a market place in which hundreds of thousands of apps were being created by tens of thousands of developers. Each app is focused on a very specific task and function. We can shop, download and try an app in less than three minutes. Most apps are either free, or cost less than a tall Starbucks coffee. The enormous number of choices and low cost shaped our personal mobile experience and allowed us to custom tailor it to our needs. There is no doubt this has rapidly accelerated adoption of consumer mobile devices and apps.

Today, our consumer mobile experience is defined by the apps on our devices. Without the instant availability and near zero cost of consumer mobile apps, we would not see the astronomical app download and usage levels that we see today. For example, the Apple App Store sees hundreds of new app submissions per day and contains over 700,000 apps published by over 40,000 app developers. For the most part, these apps provide very specific, but useful, functional benefits.

To get this same type of hyper acceleration in the enterprise, we need the power of the “instant app” and we need it at a very low cost.

Sources: Sleetherz.com[1], 148apps.biz[2]

Business applications make up a very small percentage of apps available on the market.  Applications that connect to enterprise systems and provide enterprise grade security are extremely rare.  Given this lack of choice, many enterprises have chosen the de facto route of using traditional software development processes and solutions to develop their apps.

Source: 148apps.biz[3]

Unfortunately, traditional enterprise software development is known for being expensive, time consuming and fraught with opportunities for errors and delays. Approaches that rely on resource-intensive Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAPs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) add licensing costs without significantly reducing project time and risk. Alternative approaches that utilize code generation, screen scraping and cross-compiling offer shortcuts but lack flexibility and skimp on the user experience.

A true instant app has the following characteristics:

• No code: Not written, not generated and never deployed
• Initial build and delivery of app takes less than thirty days
• Break out most relevant pieces of ERP/software data and process to serve specific job functions quickly
• Users have high level of influence into app function, maximizing user experience and satisfaction
• Instant app administrators respond to user feedback immediately, and can deploy app changes in real-time
• A minimized learning curve: Provide a user experience that is tailored to their mobile platform
• Has ability to combine multiple back end system functions into a single seamless user experience
• Doesn’t create new maintenance obligations for IT
• Handle changes in mobile platforms without any impact to users and IT

In a traditional environment, many of the criteria above are contradictory.  That is the reason we have to break away from tradition to achieve the full potential of the market ahead of us.  We need the Enterprise Instant App.  The instant app has the power to disrupt the enterprise mobile landscape with flexibility, cost-effectiveness and user experience that right now do not seem possible.

In my next blog post, I will discuss the impact of app creation and maintenance costs on mobile project ROI.

It’s as though the C-suite can’t get a break when change demands IT investment. The issue of change is self-evident. New technology, new competitors, industry trends, new business models and new markets, demand a rate of investment that is prudently approved in boardrooms on an annual basis.

But to put math to it, Gartner’s Key IT Metrics Data study – a study of over 9,000 public and private companies across 80 countries – estimates that on average, only 14% of IT budgets were dedicated to such obvious investments. Gartner calls this the “Transform” component of IT spend.

The same report shows that 20% of those budget dollars are spent on “Growth” which they define as capacity expansion, software upgrades and dollars spent to accommodate organic growth in users. In addition to this 20%, [i]two thirds of IT budgets were spent on the “Run” component of businesses in 2011. Not surprisingly this is the non-discretionary expense required to operate businesses, meet regulatory requirements and generally continuing operations.

In total, about 86% of IT budgets support the status quo versus 14% transformation, differentiation and building value beyond the current state of affairs for shareholders.

In my former life as an IT outsourcing GM, my value proposition was typically to reduce the cost of the Run and Grow elements. As this strategy proliferated in the 1990’s and 2000’s, the dollars reallocated to transformation have increased for the most active and aggressive companies. My former constituents – Telecoms, Utilities and Media – have reached 16% to 17% in transformation spending, mostly by reducing their run components to between 55% to 62%. Whether leading or following the trend, these entities have done a reasonably good job of evolving in highly competitive industries. They compete with:

• Rivals, especially with deregulation in the late 1990’s and some blurring of lines among their own businesses, e.g. cable versus telcom.
• The need for capital inside their own companies where transmission systems and networks are the key delivery mechanisms.
• And of course, with the cost of their legacy systems.

But what about the others trapped at or below the average of 14% transformation? These companies must virtualize all or part of their IT asset base.

It’s been said that best in class companies reduce their Run expenses to 55% or less of their budgets. If you are one of the companies who still have not exploited outsourcing as an alternative, I recommend it. Tactical payback is available and can be secured contractually.

But for the longer term, I recommend that you engineer “elasticity” into your environment starting with software design and development, and that you only acquire solutions built on the key principles of elasticity and multi-tenancy.

A few keys for the CXO here:

• The underlying driver to become elastic will not be the CXO’s understanding of “Cloud” technologies. Rather, the inevitable comparison of large capital requests for new projects that fail 24% of the time[ii] versus operating expense requests for pay as you go solutions and infrastructure will fuel this trend.
• A rapid expansion of your Service Oriented Architecture skill set to prepare for both migration to and the incorporation of Cloud-based services is a must.
• Move low visibility applications to Cloud service providers and platforms to develop your knowledge base with the inevitable.
• Another key is application modernization, but I will defer those issues to a later blog.
• Remember that traditional vendors have installed bases as well, and may not always (or quickly) be the answer during the elastic revolution. An example of forward thinking architectural engineering is available at http://catavolt.com/dualmodelwhitepaper.html.

The great thing about ramping up your experience base in the area of elasticity is that it will serve equally well in the “Grow” the business category. Elasticity, while helpful in reducing the costs of “Run” the business assets, is essential in the Grow component.

For growth, the primary key is to avoid making your “Run” problem worse. Obviously an elastic “Run” foundation will accommodate growth more economically. But the definition of “Growth” includes enhancements and upgrades to IT systems. In this category a mild phenomenon is evolving to address the needs for device independent mobile interfaces.

Strategic Spending by Vertical Industry – Run, Grow and Transform the Business (Percentages) Source: Gartner (March 2012)

Enterprise application availability on mobile devices is in high demand. It is estimated that by 2014, 90% of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices.[iii] The value of this trend is hard to dispute. Having the right data at the right time to make a better decision is powerful.

Not many of us work at our desks all day, yet decades of investment in IT systems are available to us “in the saddle.” Extending existing applications is one of the best examples of how to get more value out of “Run” classified assets, and an inexpensive means to address Growth”. The method is the key differentiator here.

Beware of development kits called Mobile Enterprise Application Platforms (MEAPs) whose purpose is to simply delivery device agnostic versions of applications (old and recent). This approach is double indemnity for CIO’s – development time, risk, and cost to meet Growth requirements, and a compounding effect due to ongoing maintenance in future years (aka, added Run costs).

More elastic products have arrived in the market to address this need.

Additional reading suggested: Why isn’t IT spending creating more value?, PriceWaterhouseCoopers connectedthinking, June 2008.

PCMC, a global manufacturer with over 1100 associates worldwide, has been successful in redesigning a suite of products, resulting in high customer acceptance and increased orders – in some cases more than doubling sales projections. As a result, PCMC needed to find additional manufacturing capacity and to automate communications with its business partners.

But coordinating their partner efforts was a challenge.  Using Catavolt’s Exender service,  PCMC created a Supplier Work List application that facilitated real time collaboration between the company and its partners.  The result is a 20% increase in on-time deliveries and a happy workforce.

“Before this, we were stressed.  A lot of that stress has been taken away.” said Hicham Yaagoubi, Manufacturing Supervisor at PCMC.

Click here for the full case study.  Click here to learn more about how applications are built with the Catavolt Extender service.

Luverne Truck Equipment has been designing and manufacturing high-quality truck accessories in the Heartland of America since 1963.  With a distributed workforce, Luverne was facing communication challenges over inventory and invoicing.  They turned to Catavolt and now their sales reps have real-time access to all the data they need right from their iPads.  Luverne implemented Catavolt Extender with no new investments other than iPad tablets and a few hours of instruction for IT.

Download the case study.

In the global economy collaboration cannot be disrupted by geographies, time zones or languages.  Many business processes are now dependent on the feedback and knowledge of people that do not share the same workplace, network or IT resources.  Cloud applications offer new possibilities for global collaboration.  The Catavolt Hybrid Cloud is a great example.  Using Catavolt, a company can take a traditional business process that currently resides in an in-house enterprise system and divide it into small, easy to use and easy to access cloud applications.  These cloud applications can be accessed securely by people inside and outside the corporate network. Continue reading →

A few of us from Catavolt attended the Gartner local briefing on mobile computing in Atlanta today, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1905318. An interesting statistic was shown during the iPad presentation. According to a study, the computing time for sales reps increased by over an hour a day when they were given iPads. Their time on the laptop did not decrease significantly, their time on their smartphones stayed about the same and new time was spent on the iPad. A very brave soul asked the question that we were all wondering: Do we want sales reps glued to their iPads when they should be interacting with customers? For a minute we all thought we stumped the expert! But, his answer made perfect sense. You see, if the right app is given to them then the sales rep is not using the iPad instead of talking to customers. He is using the iPad to better service the customer. The analyst called it getting information to the field at the moment of need. Of course I knew the answer all along… I just had too many complimentary muffins on my plate to speak up.

We actually run a great webinar series on this topic. The 30 minute webinar discusses how mobile data access can be used to increase sales. If you have been thinking about arming your sales reps with iPads or any other mobile device then it is worth a look: www.catavolt.com/events.html.

Ever since the three-tier architecture became the standard reference for enterprise software, two bridging patterns have garnered more attention from software designers than any other. These are the Model View Controller (MVC) and Object Relational Mapping (ORM) patterns. What do these two patterns have in common? They are used to bridge representational gaps that occur above and below business objects – the heart of software. Continue reading →