Apps, APIs & Analytics: What "Mobile First" Really Means

Editor's Notes

• #3: Of the world’s seven billion people, six billion have mobile phones. Only 4.5 billion have access to toilets or latrines.
• #4: 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.”
• #5: 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.
• #6: 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.
• #7: 804 survey participants worldwide.
• #8: This is the second-highest ranked investment priority, behind only app automated testing (at 46%).
• #10: 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…
• #11: 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.