Many businesses across New Zealand are racing to develop innovative mobile apps and are bypassing traditional in-house IT teams to do so.
However, in their quest for a quick fix they risk not meeting corporate governance requirements and could face potential security hazards.
As a result, UXC Connect warns that this could also have "unforeseen effects" on a range of other business processes.
Kiwi companies that can develop compliant mobile apps in a timely manner are more likely to realise competitive advantages, including delivering better customer service, reducing the costs of conducting business and taking new products directly to the market.
These apps can also enable process changes that increase the productivity of travelling or remote employees or business partners.
“Traditional application development cycles demand that business units go through an approval process, possibly taking months before app development even begins," says Anthony Willing, Principal Innovation Architect, UXC Connect.
"The approval will typically include enterprise prerequisites addressing issues such as security, rollback, accessibility, compliance, manageability and upgrade paths."
But according to Willing, time-to-market is often critical for mobile apps.
"The business unit manager takes one look at these compliance overheads and chooses to go for an external developer, using his credit card to get the mobile app developed in a fraction of the time," he adds.
"While there are software development companies building secure, enterprise-strength mobile apps, there are also a lot of digital agencies capable of delivery with all the visual and functionality bells and whistles but that lack a deep understanding of, for example, data flows and integration with core business applications."
Consequently, Willing believes companies that want to support mobile-enabled innovation have two choices:
1. "Companies can create rapid development environments for the delivery of apps to assure effective integration with existing systems and compliance with the organisation’s requirements, such as data security," he advises.
"This helps manage risks but organisations should be geared up to deploy quick-fire teams of mobile app specialists."
2. Alternatively, Willing says organisations can work with a reliable specialist mobile app development company.
"They will understand both the business need for speed and superior functionality," he adds, "while having the deep technical insight to understand and comply with the integration, security, scalability and resilience requirements in enterprise applications."