Enterprise Mobile Tips and Tricks

Mobile Enterprise Tips and Tricks

By Adam Sivell

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Adam Sivell

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied, and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete form. If you enjoyed this book, please share liberally.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Starting the mobile journey

Mobile Project

Mobile as Usual

Introduction

What is this book about?

Put simply this e-book is about enterprise mobile projects. Starting from the inception of mobility as an idea, through design and project implementation, and finally to ongoing change and support. This book offers insights and tools for all project phases to ensure a successful mobility journey.

An enterprise mobile project is unique in its complexity. These projects are a combination of business process, user interface, and integration all on a background of flaky communications, changing standards, and rapid technological change. While enterprise mobile projects have their unique challenges the aim of this book is to shine a spotlight on specific areas and provide a useful reference regardless of the chosen technical solution.

There are plenty of great project methodologies in the marketplace (for example PMP, Prince2, ASAP) this book is not a new methodology but a collection of tools, tips, tricks, and examples that can be used within any standard project methodology.

What is enterprise mobility?

The term enterprise mobility means different things to different people. For some, enterprise mobility came about when sales people starting making calls from their car phones in the 1980’s. For others it’s about business people using email, app stores, or social networking. For the purposes of this book enterprise mobility is about extending the enterprise beyond the desktop, enabling information sharing at the point of activity. Let’s start by firming up a few more definitions.

In this book mobility refers to using a mobile computing device to interact with data when and wherever there is a need. For example many businesses have account managers, customer service representatives, and/or sales people out visiting customers. When these sales folk use a phone, tablet, watch, or glasses to leverage and update information they are utilising mobile computing. Of course mobility isn’t just for sales people it is already used globally for a multitude of other uses including mobile storefronts, asset and plant maintenance, proof of delivery, warehousing, banking, inventory management, and marketing to name just a few.

Please don’t be put off by the term ‘enterprise’. Enterprise mobility isn’t just for multinational corporations. Any size business that has a process that takes place away from the desk can become a mobile enterprise. Here the term enterprise is solely used to make a distinction from consumer mobility. In enterprise mobility the goal is to enable effective business process, provide a mechanism to achieve business goals, and more efficiently make use of the information assets that a business has. With consumer mobility the goal could be to sell mobile applications for entertainment, social networking, and gaming or brand experience to the general public. While there is not always 100% separation generally speaking enterprise mobility requires some integration to a back-end system.

Key concepts

To help set some context its best to understand a couple of the key talking points in the