How Are Mobile Applications Becoming Central to Enterprise Performance?
Enterprise applications are pivotal to an enterprise’s performance. As most companies adopt hybrid and remote work models, real-time collaboration and fast communication between teams have become necessary.
An array of enterprise applications enables teams to communicate, collaborate, schedule, and attend virtual meetings, update project status, and complete administrative tasks efficiently. Among others, these apps are predominantly used by:
- HR team for leave approvals, rewards, and recognition, self-help portals to log complaints, or to understand HR policies and employee benefits
- Sales and marketing team for generating sales orders and quotations, accessing and updating customer information on CRM, creating a knowledge resource of marketing assets, and managing leads
- Accounts team for managing expenses, account payables, and receivables and approving invoices
- Project or operation teams for managing projects, updating project status, placing orders, and managing inventories
- IT teams for managing IT self-service portals, addressing or closing IT tickets, and allocating and managing IT assets
Earlier employees had to rely on desktops to access the applications. But with most applications launching their mobile versions, employee productivity has improved exceptionally. Now, employees can log in to the mobile application from anywhere and at any time to attend meetings, send files, take notes, approve leaves or other requests from direct reports, and complete their tasks. Applications like Zoom, Slack, custom tools, and Outlook email have found a permanent place on mobile phones. This enables employees to make quick decisions and stay focused and productive at work.
Although mobile applications are beneficial, there are some concerns that enterprises must address to improve adoption among employees.
Challenges With Enterprise Applications
Security Challenges
Enterprises are concerned about data and security breaches. As employees also use third-party or open-source software and connected devices on the same mobiles, enterprises must ensure that there are no unpatched software or non-secure endpoints. An oversight could expose the enterprise app to vulnerabilities and lead to security risks.
Endpoint security, encryption, a zero-trust security model, and frequent security audits are necessary to protect the network and application from security threats.
Interoperability Issues
Seamless data exchange between different applications is essential to help employees make accurate decisions. However, integration or interoperability issues between applications and systems could make data exchange complex and impact the decision-making process.
Enterprises must build an app that can easily integrate with disparate systems like third-party or legacy applications and ensure smooth data flow.
Frequent Crashes
If the app’s objective is to enhance productivity, enterprises must ensure that it works smoothly when used on employee mobile phones. Frequent app crashes, especially during peak work time, WILL impede the employee’s work. They may have to wait for the app to work again to complete their task.
Enterprises cannot depend on apps for mission-critical activities if performance remains a concern. They must test the app regularly to identify elements that could slow down its performance and fix them to boost productivity. They must check for issues like load imbalance and unexpected traffic spikes and fix them. Apart from testing within the controlled ecosystem of the enterprise, it is important to test the application experience in the hands of the real users; i.e the employees. The testers must use robust and functional monitoring tools to find the root causes of performance issues and rectify them as or even before they occur.
Slow Load and Response Time
Performance is not just about crashes. Imagine trying to schedule an urgent meeting or raising a service request on the IT self-service portal and the app taking time to complete the task or times out frequently. Sounds frustrating, doesn’t it? Well, that’s how employees would feel while using an app with a slow load and response time. Slow response time occurs when processing a request takes time. Industry standards dictate that an app must load between one to three seconds but even that timeframe is being crushed as employees become used to blazing-fast response times from the consumer applications they use on the same mobiles. Any delays could lead to employees abandoning the app or resorting to old ways of doing tasks or using via-media approaches that are less controlled and trackable. It could impact the employees’ productivity and hurt transparency and reporting.
Understanding the app’s backend functions is important. So is finding out the possible issues the application will face in the real world, on the mobile phones of employees. This makes it necessary to find out what’s causing the delay in processing requests, and fix it to improve the load and response time.
How Can Enterprises Build Flawless Apps and Boost Performance?
Mobile applications are central to enterprise performance and employee productivity. Enterprises can communicate and collaborate with employees easily through apps. Hence, it’s important that the app functions at its optimum level.
The onus lies on enterprises to ensure that the mobile application works well when employees use it. That means without frequent crashes, unexpected downtime, or performance lag. Poor user experience could lead to fewer employees using the app. Enterprises cannot afford such a situation in a hyper-competitive business landscape.
appNeura can help prevent such situations. At appNeura, we use our Digital Experience Monitoring tool to find the exact reason behind the app’s poor performance. We track all the critical parameters and display them on a rich dashboard. That helps find and fix the issues before they occur or escalate. This enables enterprises to build superior enterprise apps that employees can use easily.
To know more about the tool and other solutions, contact us.