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Technology is supposed to simplify our lives, but anyone can remember a situation where implementing new tech ends up costing more time than it saves. When it’s on a personal level and you waste time on a new app that you paid $5 for, it’s no big loss. But when your company decides to build a mobile enterprise app, which will cost an average of $270,000, that’s a decision that should involve much more deliberation than an app store download.
Many companies take on the monumental task of building an enterprise app without fully grasping the debt they’ll have to repay down the line. Any development project will accrue technical debt, which is the work that needs to be done before a project is “complete.”
There are a lot of good reasons for a company to utilize its own enterprise app, including training, internal reporting, content marketing or sales empowerment. But companies would be wise to take note of the challenges associated with building their own enterprise app before going down that rabbit hole, and finding themselves too deep to crawl out.
Kicking the Project Off
Putting the six-figure price point aside, there are some other costs, starting with time. Most companies will spend at least 7 months building their apps, and the need for all that time and money is where a lot of technical debt is built up. That’s because needs can change in the middle of development, and corners get cut on multiple fronts: deep dives aren’t done to find employees’ pain points, development is outsourced to junior developers who write patchy code, or the software won’t integrate with existing systems.
Keeping up with the Times
“If you build it, they will come” might be true for enterprise apps initially, but that doesn’t mean end users will stick around to use the tool down the road. Employees expect the quality of a consumer app for everything they use, and if they don’t have that in your app, they’ll simply avoid it. App development is not a set it and forget it deal. A big chunk of that is (hopefully) straightforward bug fixes, but many issues from mobile development stem from UI issues, and what makes a good UI or design doesn’t stay static over time as you can see from changes to Facebook, Windows or iOS. Your app will have to stay in step with these design practices, along with device updates, new devices and even brand new OSs.
Keeping up with Your Company
Aside from general design preferences, an enterprise app must meet the needs of your company and its employees. The first part of this challenge is that your app will need to scale. It’ll need to be able to handle more users, more data, and more content. This goes back to how much time was spent in developing a flexible app, but your app will need to evolve with the business as well. With any luck, those business needs won’t change during the initial development of the app. Over time, changes are inevitable. They may be new metrics you’ll need to report, the app will need to cater to a new department, or your salespeople will need to access content in a completely different way for a new type of customer.
Incurring a debt doesn’t mean that building an enterprise app is a bad idea. What it means is that just like borrowing from the bank, you need to know you’ll be able to pay that debt back with a further investment of time and money. Your app will always need to be relevant and you’ll need to have the resources to do so.
More and more CIOs are turning to the cloud or SaaS solutions (63% according to a Kinvey survey) to reduce the time it takes to develop and deploy apps. Think of SaaS as renting out a luxury apartment with housekeeping, maintenance, and a doorman included, instead of building a house where you have to pay for (constant) maintenance and repairs. Building an enterprise app is a long-term commitment that can exponentially diminish in value in a short period of time.
If you’re considering an implementation of a cloud-based SaaS service, Jason Shah, Mediafly’s CTO, has put together a guide for vetting a vendor.
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