BI? Website relaunch? It's all about mobile app design

Enterprises are outsourcing mobile app design and keeping the names of their partners a closely guarded secret for competitive gain. IT departments are being asked to redesign customer-facing websites with mobile use in mind, and provision desktop apps like ERP and CRM in a mobile environment.

As Karen Goulart, Features Writer for SearchCIO.com, points out in her story on app dev this week:

Experts and IT leaders believe the real business value in today’s enterprise is being created at the application level — be those apps employee-facing or consumer-facing. They also believe that in this information-on-demand era, those applications need to be part of a mobile strategy.”Nowadays we use those terms, app and mobile app, almost synonymously,” said Michael Le Du, chief technology officer at New York City-based Maxim magazine. “More often than not, when you’re reading or talking about an app, it’s mobile, because that’s really where all the activity is right now.”

Le Du and his development team made their own mobile apps as part of a website redesign, but there is a growing debate about what’s better: build versus buy. A prime example is the case of two hotel chains, one of which developed its own concierge application. But when the author of this story, SearchCIO.com’s Senior Writer Linda Tucci, brought the idea of mobile app design to another hotel chain’s IT leader, he passed on the idea. He believes any app they need will be developed by someone else. Why bother with the cost of mobile app dev when just about any app you might need most likely will become available commercially?