The mobile application market is projected at an annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of 14.3% between now and 2030, and businesses are capitalizing by developing mobile applications for customers, business partners, and internal use.
In large part, the mobile app market is being driven by the explosive growth of mobile devices, which over 60% of the world’s population use. Not all of this use is confined to social media, emails, phone calls, and texts. Accordingly, businesses have become involved with launching retail websites for mobile devices, as well as transactional engines for mobile payment processing, e-commerce, banking and booking systems for use in a variety of smart mobile devices.
In the process, the key for IT has been the integration of these new mobile applications with enterprise systems. How do you ensure that a mobile app is tightly integrated into your existing business processes and your IT base, and how do you ensure that it will perform consistently well every time it is used? Is your security policy across mobile devices as robust as it is across other enterprise assets, such as mainframes, networks and servers? Does the user interface across all mobile devices navigate equally well and with a certain degree of consistency, no matter which device is used?
In most cases, IT departments (and users and customers) will say that total mobile device integration is still a work in progress.
The Role of Mobile App Integration
In the past, the integration of mobile applications with other IT infrastructure was more or less confined to the IT assets that the mobile app minimally needed to perform its functions. If the app was there for placing an online order, access to the enterprise order entry, inventory and fulfillment systems was needed, but maybe nothing else for the first installation. If the app was designed for a warehouse worker to operate a series of robots to pick and place items in a warehouse, it was specifically developed just for that, and on first installment, it might not have been integrated into inventory and warehouse management systems. However, now that tech companies are placing their R&D emphasis on smart phones and devices, IT needs to formulate a more inclusive integration strategy for mobile applications that these apps more “complete” when they launch.
The Elements of Mobile App Integration
To achieve total integration with the rest of the enterprise IT portfolio, and possibly with third-party services, a mobile app must do the following:
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Attain seamless data exchange across all systems, along with having the ability to invoke and use system-level infrastructure components such as storage or system-level routines to do its work.
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Use application programming interfaces (APIs) so it can access other IT and/or vendor systems.
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Conform to the same security and governance standards that other IT assets are subject to.
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Provide users and customers with a simple and (as much as possible) uniform graphical user interface (GUI).
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Be right-fitted into existing business and system workflows.
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This isn’t just good IT. It also makes major contributions to user productivity and customer satisfaction.
Workflow Integration
In late 2024, a health insurance company unveiled an automated online process for new customer registration. Unfortunately, the new app didn’t include all data elements needed for registration, and it actually froze in process. Users ended up calling the company and enduring long wait times until they could complete their registrations with a human agent.
This was a case of workflow integration failure, because critical ingredients required for registration had been left out of the online mobile app. How did this happen?
The project might have been rushed through to meet a deadline or signed off as a first (albeit incomplete) version of an app that would be later enhanced. Or, possibly, QA might have been skipped. But to an experienced IT “eye,” the app was clearly missing data, which suggested that integration with other enterprise systems, or data transfers via API with supporting vendor systems, had been missed.
The app’s process flow also was a “miss” because if the project team had tested the mobile app’s process flow against the business workflow, they would have seen (like customers did) that key data elements were missing, and that the workflow didn’t work.
The project team should also have verified that security and governance standards had been met, and that the mobile app user experience was consistent, whether the customer was using an iPhone or an Android.
Summary
Statista says that the mobile application market will reach $756 billion by 2027. In the US, 47% of mobile apps are being used for retail transactions, and another 19% are serving as portals, whether for customers, business partners or employees.
There is virtually no business that isn’t developing mobile apps today for its customers, business partners and/or employees, but what has lagged is the same level of discipline over mobile app development that IT expects for traditional enterprise app development.
Central to this is mobile application integration.
It’s no longer acceptable to let an app “fly” with just the basics, but with many functions and data elements still missing. It’s time for top-to-bottom mobile app integration, whether that integration requires complete data, a uniform user experience across all devices, or something else.