It is of paramount importance that an organisation's staff are able to use their own mobile devices to gain access to everything from e-mail to enterprise resource planning systems and other company information, says Greg Comline, senior manager at Deloitte.
On this note, Deloitte, in partnership with ITWeb, is conducting an online bring your own app (BYOA) survey.
The main objectives of the survey are to understand how South African businesses are enabling the use of mobile apps within the workplace, and to determine if organisations are implementing the necessary infrastructure for employees to develop their own apps, enabling them to be more efficient and innovative.
When asked about whether organisations should be developing their own in-house BYOA solutions or outsourcing them, Comline says: "The point about developing BYOA in-house or outsourcing is more about how you partner and use apps that are already available to develop your solutions. The critical part of BYOA is how an organisation enables the app designer (employees or clients) to access corporate information."
The overall success or failure of any organisation's approach to mobile apps is based on the bring your own device (BYOD) infrastructure, Comline points out. "This is an extension of mobile consumerisation and it is enabling individuals to innovate and make businesses more efficient."
According to Comline, there are a few key enabling factors that contribute to the success or failure of an organisation's BYOA solution projects.
"The key to enabling mobile business is about exposing contextually relevant information to employees in a secure way."
According to Comline, the key factors to enable BYOA are:
* device and user management;
* providing secure access to data sources within the business;
* putting platforms in place for corporate app stores;
* allowing employees and clients to develop apps; and
* enabling people to share and build on other people's ideas or apps.
Bring your own app trends
"The BYOD trend, where individuals are able to plug their personal devices into the corporate network, is the first part of this global shift. The next stage is the requests by employees to use apps on their personal devices in order to improve their work lives," Comline says on the BYOA trend in the South African workplace.
He continues: "Running in parallel with these trends is the ability for individuals to develop their own apps. These trends will combine in the work environment, where employees and clients will request corporate information to integrate with their personal apps.
"The bring your own app trend is a view of where businesses will need to shift over time. Businesses will need to formalise the BYOA process in order to reduce the risk of app development happening like the Excel application development that has taken place within businesses. This is an opportunity to put infrastructure in place to enable innovation."
Business as a whole will hugely benefit from implementing BYOA solutions in their organisations, says Comline, which will ultimately enable their workforce to use their mobile devices to be more efficient and innovative.
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