Recap of Mobile Monday Boston October 17, 2011
October 18, 2011 at 8:00 am Leave a comment
The theme of October’s Mobile Monday Boston was “Building Successful Mobile Web and Native Apps in the Enterprise”, a particularly relevant and timely topic for me. The event was divided into two panels: vendors and service providers on the first, mobile executives of large enterprises on the second. The consistent theme between the two was how to take a strategic approach to your mobile roadmap.
There was a consensus that organizations currently emphasize technology at the expense of solving real-world problems for their users. The service providers in particular, spoke of the “disposable apps” they are asked to build: don’t involve IT, too much focus on iOs vs. web, built to check a box and not as part of a longer-term strategy. Both panels also warned of trying to simply replicate your existing website on mobile; David Nguyen, VP mobile strategy at Putnam Investments compared it to the brochureware approach to websites in the web’s early days. But identifying the features which really need to be mobile optimized is challenging: Nguyen had the line of the night when he advised that “fitting 20% of a website into your mobile version is easy, getting it down to 5% is hard.”
Mobile applications should not only be sub-sets of the full websites; mobility creates opportunities to deliver unique features. Panel members urged the audience to find low-tech processes which can be improved. For example, Putnam salespeople now use an application with real-time data instead of paper presentations of old data. Alex Bratton, CEO of LexTech Global Services described an application his firm built with a solution identified by the client’s truck drivers. Matt Foell, senior analyst at PNC Bank stated an agile approach is needed and that, as a result of this methodology, users are PNC’s best source of ideas for new features.
Both panels also called for automated test solutions, pointing out that device and OS fragmentation renders non-automated testing unscalable. Security will remain a challenge, particularly with Android. Both Joe Ferra, chief wireless officer at Fidelity and Eric Weinberg, VP business development at DeviceAnywhere emphasized that mobile web capabilities are quite robust, though Jonathan Stark, VP architecture at Mobiquity noted that “HTML5 is not a silver bullet”. Stark also noted that integrating with legacy applications remains a challenge in building mobile applications in the enterprise, while Ferra later noted that consumers expect this challenge to be overcome in order to present a consistent experience across across mobile and desktop applications.
Were you at the event, too, and have anything to add to these notes?
Entry filed under: mobile. Tags: applications, enterprise, mobile, mobile monday, momobo, networking.
My name is Adam Gross. 
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed