With enterprise mobile strategies becoming a critical factor for employee and customer engagement, it's crucial that companies fully understand the process for mobile app development. Earlier this week, Salesforce.com announced a new set of tools for mobile development on their platform. So it’s timely to dive deeper and examine what makes a truly successful enterprise mobile initiative. Here are five tips for delivering a high-impact application to your organization:

1. Start With An Educated Direction
   Know your environment—do you have a corporate device policy at your organization? Is there an existing reference point in the native vs hybrid architecture debate? Will you support iOS, Android, Windows Phone, or Blackberry?

   You don’t have to have every decision mapped out, but you should have an idea of your overall strategy—for instance, preferring native over hybrid solutions, or narrowing it down to just iOS and Android support. If you live in a BYOD world, it may help to poll your employees to get a sense of the mobile landscape.
    

2. Lead With The Right Use Case
   Ride-alongs with your users will tell you where the pain points lie—and where the most efficiencies can be gained. Avoid the temptation to put ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ in your application—more is not always better when it comes to mobile app functionality. Concentrate on a set of common actions that enable or enhance a specific business-level goal or workflow.
    
3. Design Is Everything
   On a four inch screen, every pixel counts. Poor design choices are never more swiftly punished than in the mobile world—from app navigation to button style (and size!). Spend the time up front to design the user experience and interface, and you will be rewarded with a beautiful, intuitive application. Above all, the goal is to create something your employees can use easily (and maybe even enjoy) to support the business.
    
4. Build Early, Build Often
   Early and frequent working builds will validate your design decisions and will get important feedback that you may miss from mockups and wireframes. Everything might look great on paper, but once in the hands of an actual user, you’ll uncover key interaction details that might go unnoticed otherwise. Use an application like TestFlight to manage builds, and collect key metrics about usage.
    
5. Deployment Is Harder Than You Think
   If you are building for an internal team, odds are the Apple App Store or Google Play are not going to be your preferred method of distribution. Enterprise mobile distribution almost hearkens back to the ‘olden’ days of desktop software—somewhere, somehow, someone has to actually install this thing on a physical device. How do you package it? Where will you host it? How do you direct users to this location? How will you distribute updates? Think about these questions well before you’re ready to distribute your app to users—remember that even listing on the App Store requires a somewhat convoluted packaging and review process that can last weeks.

The right mobile tools can improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing among your employees, and help them engage with customers more effectively. Follow these five tips to craft an enterprise mobile strategy that delivers value in the palm of your hand.

Looking to drive mobile innovation at your organization?  See how Bluewolf has helped companies like GlaxoSmithKline develop cutting-edge solutions that drive employee and customer engagement.