Print

IT and developers: Hand in hand for MDM



Suzanne Kattau
Email
January 16, 2013 —  (Page 1 of 3)
When it comes to mobile device management, there’s a fundamental mindset shift that’s required in today’s organizations between IT and application developers. Instead of being at odds, IT and developers should collaborate with one another. According to businessmen, IT’s traditional goal of controlling the developer should be replaced by the willingness to do six things to help the application developer do his or her job better. They also said there are also five ways in which developers can help IT to more effectively do its job.

Through this partnership, IT and developers can better manage their organization’s mobile devices and applications throughout their life cycle. “If IT can create value for the app developer, then they’re going to have a partnership where they can work together,” said Ojas Rege, vice president of strategy at MobileIron, a mobile device-management solution provider.

“If IT can’t do that, then the line of business is just going to go right around IT and you’re going to have hundreds of orphaned, unsecured applications out there in the next 12 months in every major organization.”

Because of the importance of this collaboration, mobile device management has grown much beyond the fact that IT can, for example, remotely wipe a device. “The MDM concept is much broader today,” said Yoram Mizrachi, CTO at Perfecto Mobile, a provider of cloud-based mobile-application testing solutions. “Now IT has to support hundreds of developers and testers in the organization. And developers need, basically, an IT service of managing those mobile devices.”

There are six core things that IT can do to provide value to the enterprise app developer—and thus the organization—and it begins with developer sourcing, according to experts. IT has to help organizations find capable developers. “What developers are you going to use? It’s not easy to find great mobile developers,” Rege said. “Which vendors do you use? Do you contract? This is the whole notion of, ‘Let me help you to get the resources you need to build a great app.’ ”

The second fundamental thing that IT can do, Rege said, is to provide developers with access and support for enterprise APIs because all of these apps are going to rely on enterprise data. Having really well-designed APIs to build apps on top of is going to make app development cheaper, faster and more effective. “That’s absolutely a role that IT can play, which is, ‘Hey, I’ll give you the APIs, I’ll give you guidance around those and I’ll educate you on them. I’ll tell you how to use them effectively and I’ll make new ones available when you need them,’ and so forth,” he said.

The third key thing involves emphasizing the importance of the user experience and giving developers design best practices. This is important because, with mobile apps in particular, user experience is absolutely the litmus test to adoption, according to Rege. He said if a company screws up the user experience, it has just wasted money.

“All of us are very used to incredible consumer apps,” he said. “Consumer apps have set the bar for user experience. So, if I try to cram a big enterprise app onto that little mobile screen and give you 15 pull-downs, you’re just not going to use it.”


Related Search Term(s): mobile device management

Pages 1 2 3 


Share this link: http://sdt.bz/37313
 
Most Read  Latest News  Resources

close
NEXT ARTICLE
Kik Launches an Open API to Enable Mobile Developers to Bake Instant Content Sharing Into Any App
API-powered developers like Rude Boy Games, DrinkOwl and FlyScreen can promote their apps to millions of Kik Messenger users Read More...
 
 
 




News on Monday  more>>
Android Developer News  more>>
SharePoint Tech Report  more>>
Big Data TechReport  more>>

   
 
 

 


Download Current Issue
MAY 2013 PDF ISSUE

Need Back Issues?
DOWNLOAD HERE

Want to subscribe?