This document discusses the shift towards mobile-first strategies in enterprises. It makes three key points:
1. The user experience must be optimized for mobile as users expect smart, context-aware experiences on their mobile devices. Legacy web approaches are insufficient for the mobile environment.
2. Enterprises have lost control over release velocity as mobile platforms and user expectations evolve rapidly. HTML5 cannot meet all mobile needs due to differences in browser support and priorities of mobile platform providers.
3. Enterprises must move from reactive to strategic in their mobile approach, developing metrics to measure user experience and outcomes, sourcing both internally and externally, and pursuing continuous innovation to differentiate themselves and open new markets.
Apps, APIs & Analytics: What "Mobile First" Really Means
1. Apps, APIs & Analytics: What “Mobile
First” Really Means
NOLAN WRIGHT, CO-FOUNDER & CTO
appcelerator@twitter
2. Mobile phones are now more
ubiquitous than indoor plumbing.
“DEPUTY UN CHIEF CALLS FOR URGENT ACTION TO TACKLE GLOBAL SANITATION CRISIS." UN NEWS CENTER. UN, 21 MAR.
2013
3. The Emerging IT World?
PAST:
PRESENT:
“PLANNED ECONOMY”
“FREE-FOR-ALL”
Centrally planned, centrally sourced
One size fits all
„Bread lines‟
Product = Industrial strength
Product < > Inspiring
Nominal central control
BYOD/A, rise of shadow IT
Silos, inevitable redundancies
Variable results (usability, security,
performance, etc.)
4. Major Technology Shifts
1990s TO TODAY
CLIENT
SERVER
Early 1990s
One-to-one
Rich UX (GUI)
Distributed computing
Local Network
INTERNET
Late 1990s
One-to-many
Weak UX (HTML-Based)
Server-centric computing
Global network
MOBILE
Today
Many-to-many
Rich UX (driven by mobile OSs)
Distributed computing
Internet of Things
5. Needs for Mobile Success
Performance metrics
Usage patterns
Adoption rates
Lifecycle efficacy
Great experience
across platforms
Maximum reuse
Flex sourcing of
skills
Optimized payloads
Online/offline sync
Elastic scale
Secure access
6. Hard truth #1: The user is king.
The explosion that
killed the PC
User chooses the app, not you.
Expectation is for smart, purposeful, contextaware experiences. (Forget “user error” jokes.)
R.I.P. Wintel.
88% of enterprises agree B2B/E require the
same caliber UX as B2C.1
Hard truth #2: Release velocity is (largely)
beyond enterprise control.
Users want what they want, when they want it.
Apple wants what it wants, when it wants it.
The other platform vendors aren‟t sitting still.
Hard truth #3: HTML 5 can‟t save us.
30% feature differential across browsers.2
62%
1Q3
of enterprises
support three or
more mobile
operating
systems.1
2013 Appcelerator Enterprise Mobile Survey
Access to a small fraction of the native APIs.
Not a priority for the platform providers (see e.g.
iOS 7).
2"BII
REPORT: Why Facebook Defriended HTML5-For Now." Business Insider. N.p., 24 Oct. 2012.
7. Why legacy middleware won‟t cut it:
WEB
XML, SOAP
JSON
Data payload
Large and static, optimized for
PC display and feature-driven
applications
Niche and orchestrated,
optimized for small screen and
purpose-built apps
Number of
data sources
Few
Many
Data source
location
Behind the firewall
Behind the firewall, SaaS
virtual private clouds, public
cloud
Client device
profile
Data, data everywhere
MOBILE
Powerful device with few
constraints (e.g. large battery),
stationary access
Battery- and bandwidthconstrained (by network and/or
fees), roaming
Client-to-data
connectivity
Steady, broadband
Intermittent & variable speed,
driving need for online/offline
syncing and rate limiting
Usage profile
More predictable peak hours
(i.e., 9-to-5, 8-to-10)
Anywhere, anytime access
API format
And not a drop to drink?
40%
rank mobileoptimized APIs
as their top
investment
priority.1
Mobile is driving another tier into enterprise
architectures.
1Q3
2013 Appcelerator Enterprise Mobile Survey
8. The lifeblood of great
user experience
A move from lagging to leading
indicators.
⅓
1Q3
report their apps
fail to meet the
needs of end
users.1
2013 Appcelerator Enterprise Mobile Survey
9. IT Mobile Maturity Model
PROACTIVE
EXPERIMENTAL
REACTIVE
LEARN
MITIGATE RISK
IT & LoBs pursue own
ends
Little or no success
metrics
< 5 apps, primarily
B2C
3rd party sourcing
Legacy “application”
thinking: design, tools,
processes
Some IT & LoB
coordination (e.g.
security)
“ROI aware”: lagging
success measures
(e.g. public reviews),
ad hoc outcomes
5-10 apps, B2C and
some B2E, limited
platforms
3rd
party sourcing for
B2C, in-house for B2E
Legacy “application”
thinking: design, tools,
processes
TACTICAL
STRATEGIC
OPTIMIZE SPEED,
COST AND EXPERIENCE
DIFFERENTIATE,
OPEN NEW MARKETS
Shared services, CoE
experiments
“ROI expectant”:
leading indicators for
success
Upwards of 30 apps,
B2x, all major
platforms
3rd party sourcing
where necessary
(exception)
App-oriented design,
tooling, processes
“Innovation Exchange”
“ROI ensured”: unified
analytics: experience,
adoption, diagnostics,
etc.
No limits to scale
(number of apps,
device & platform type,
etc.)
Sourcing ecosystem:
vetted, best-of-breed
contributors (internal or
external)
Continuous mobile
innovation
STRATEGIC
10. Mobile Drives a New IT Innovation Model
PRESENT:
FUTURE:
“FREE-FOR-ALL”
“INNOVATION EXCHANGE”
Nominal central control
LoBs go it alone
Variable results (usability, security,
performance, etc.)
Inevitable redundancies
Nimble and specialized, fit for purpose
Looser coupling, higher cohesion
Expanded ecosystem = more innovation
New market opportunities
Of the world’s seven billion people, six billion have mobile phones. Only 4.5 billion have access to toilets or latrines.
Let’s startby touching on a reality many of our enterprise IT customers are facing. If you go back only a few years, you remember that IT (perhaps in conjunction with one or two major outsource players) was the only game in town when it came to providing technology to the enterprise. Whether by design or accident, we ran something like a centrally planned economy: a big budget, almost total ownership of all production, and with products that were certainly industrial strength if not always the most elegant or beautiful thing to look at. The chief aim was stability: get the applications built, stood up, running, and see that they don’t fall over. If you were a line of business customer, you knew that all technology requests went to IT, we in IT would do our best to get to it as soon as we could (it was almost never immediately), and there really wasn’t much other choice.When cloud and mobility exploded, something happened. And when I say “cloud and mobility” I mean it as an umbrella phrase for things like BYOD, consumerization, and the like. Essentially, folks all over the enterprise started brining in the technology they liked. They didn’t have to go through IT – they could download it from an app store or rent it over the web. Moreover, the user experience of many of these things was so much better they didn’t want to go to IT. Essentially, mobility changed the game entirely. Instead of large applications packed with features and prized for their stability that took months and months to deliver, the lines of business needed smart, purpose-built apps that could run on all kinds of new devices and be delivered and updated in matters of weeks. And so we have what many enterprises confront today: a kind of free-for-all approach many lines of business say to themselves: ‘IT doesn’t get it, they’re optimized for an old world, and for me to get the kind of mobile innovation that’s going to define our future, I need to do it myself.”
Now, if we apply a technology lens to this shift, we learn some interesting things. When we first started building applications back in the client/server days, we were talking one device – the PC – and mainly one backend system, which lived inside the enterprise and that we connected to via LAN/WAN. Pretty simple (at least on paper).When the internet cropped up, the primary change was to the connection point and the backend. We had more enterprise systems to contend with, and the idea was that we’d thin out the client side, replacing it with a browser, and let the backend do all the work. Of course this meant we needed better ways to connect the two than point-to-point, so we saw the rise of middleware. Interestingly, I’d argue that in this period we actually took something of a step backward in terms of user experience. We lost most of the client-side logic, and so the UX became a flatter, more static thing. But regardless, we were still using only a single, dominant device and OS – the Wintel PC – with some comparatively minor differences among the web browsers that ran inside.Well, the mobile world really blows all this up. And it blows up every front: we’re now contending with a range of backend systems – enterprise, SaaS, social, even rising things like “quantified self” (FitBit, etc) that track what we do and tell us how to improve. But we’re also confronting a new and expanding range on the client or device side – PCs, tablets and phones, yes, and soon enough wearables and the like. And really driving all of this is a demand – an expectation – for premium user experiences. Flat form web pages won’t cut it anymore. If I’m a user – customer, partner, employee, doesn’t matter – I expect smart, pleasing apps that run anywhere at anytime on my device of choice.
If we return to this mobile landscape of many devices on one hand and many data sources on the other, and imperative to connect them in a way that’s seamless and elegant and delivers a great user experience, we see three necessities emerge.First, you’ve clearly got to have the means to create superior apps that will deliver the best possible experience and do it across a range of devices and OSs (no more Wintel monopoly). In the ideal world this means being able to reuse code vs. creating dedicated code bases per device or OS, and it means being able to leverage widely-available developer skills vs. having to find and recruit a bunch of new, narrowly specialized and expensive experts.Second, you need true, mobile-optimized APIs that provide open access to all the necessary data sources. Now, this is different from the legacy days of middleware and SOAP protocols, because of course these mobile devices have a different form factor, they display less data in one go and so require a different payload, they may lose connection and need to work offline and then sync when they reconnect, and so on. Finally, given the imperative around great user experience, you need proper, real-time analytics that tell you at a glance how it’s all working: are the apps being used the way we hoped? Are they crashing or throwing exceptions? What’s our service usage like? How’s our own efficiency in building and delivering new app capabilities? And so on.
804 survey participants worldwide.
This is the second-highest ranked investment priority, behind only app automated testing (at 46%).
Before we dig into what these changes require of enterprise IT teams and how Appcelerator can help, I want to pause and get a sense of where you all are in your mobile journey. We’ve built a mobile maturity model that roughly reflects what we’ve seen, not only among our customers but in our own R&D efforts and product journey…
We started by looking at the new pressures on and changing nature of IT, so I owe it to you to circle back. Given how mobility is shaping the new enterprise and what Appcelerator brings to the table, what might a future state for enterprise IT look like?For starters, I don’t think the answer is simply a return to the world of old, where IT did everything. I don’t think the lines of business want that, and I don’t think you want that. We actually envision something else – call it an “innovation exchange.” In this world, IT gets to focus on doing a few things really, really well and works to empower and broker a broader ecosystem of contributors. How might this work? For one thing, having a collection of open, mobile-optimized APIs means that other participants, even external developers, could create innovations around enterprise systems and capabilities. In this model, IT becomes the enabler even of accessing new markets that the business may not have touched. (We do exactly this with our Platform and the Open Mobile Marketplace.) And one of the chief ways you monitor the effectiveness of this exchange is through analytics. Very similar to a stock exchange, you use metrics to evaluate who’s performing and who’s falling short, and you publish these to the enterprise so departments can make their own decisions about where the next app capability should come from.This may sound a little far reaching, but we don’t think it’s utopian. You can get there, and we can help.