the business of technology blog
Enterprise Application Store & The Purposed Application
February 1st, 2011 @ 07:18pm
The iPhone App Store and similar mobile store models from Android and Blackberry have experienced tremendous consumer acceptance. Total downloads from the iPhone App Store alone recently crossed the ten billion mark. Applications come in all varieties and mash up a set of capabilities that deliver rich user experiences. The category of applications that has seen the highest adoption is social platform tools like FaceBook, Twitter and FourSquare. This rapid consumer adoption is now crossing over into the enterprise as business and IT organizations are being faced with the challenges of supporting this new class of mobile worker.
The one common element of App Store applications is that they are purposed for a specific target solution. Enterprise applications, on the other hand, tend to incorporate the full functionality of a business process within their design. Organizations that have taken the first step to extract important business functionality from existing applications have turned to Service Oriented Architectures (SOA). The SOA model enables the decomposition and access to business logic and data layers – enabling externalization of the most critical functions. This results in the ability to share services across the enterprise as well as externally to partners and others within the organization’s business ecosystem.
SOA makes the design of an Enterprise App store possible by developing purposed applications that integrate with externalized services to perform specific business functions. Examples of purposed applications in the Enterprise App store could include:
- Decomposition of CRM processes into the most used functions such as capturing an Activity, scheduling, or Contact entry.
- Delivery of purposed HRIS capabilities like time reporting, benefits management, time off and Company Handbook
- Streamlining of corporate portal Personal Profile Management and Company News
An Enterprise App Store has some very tangible benefits for the enterprise:
- Users can provision applications that are important to their business function
- Application simplification is made possible – each component app has a specific purpose, making it easier for users to learn and thus reducing training and support overhead
- Automatic updating of applications – users don’t need to be concerned about what version they are running as the latest will be pushed to the device
- Installation and removal of applications is seamless, using the capabilities of the device’s operating system
- Application components execute in a mode understood by the user alongside other applications
There are six technical factors to determine organizational readiness for an Enterprise App Store:
- Is mobility adoption on the rise with demand coming from field or remote users?
- Has there been a history of complexity challenges in existing application interfaces?
- Can specific and frequently used pathways through existing applications be segmented as standalone capabilities?
- Is the application development approach iterative?
- Is SOA design an element of the overall IT architecture?
- Can security architecture and mobile device management be delivered?
Organizations looking at future architectures must consider incorporating the Enterprise App store model and SOA approach to streamline interfaces and deliver applications that meet the needs of today’s mobile workforce. Let us know what is happening on this topic within your organization by responding to the post.