Introduction

In today’s corporate world, Information Technology (IT) is important to almost any business. regardless of the type of business activities (Li & Vasilakos, 2015), the world has become dependent on computing technologies to reinforce how business offer its missions. The procedures that offer financial, human resource management, sales and supply chain marketing, customer relationship management, messaging and web exchange provisions are determined by deployed and accessible technology enablement. IT management planning is a major component of its life cycle (Jose & Castillo, 2014). The expert IT aware expert-whether the CIO (Chief Information Officer), line IT executive, or a IT planner-identifies that the life cycle components are inter connected with effective planning as its basics.

As smart devices and tablets market continue to augment, one thing is for sure: Mobile Computing is the outlook of corporate world. Just as the PC revolutionized firms, the phase of smart devices and tablets will forever shift the whole business scenario (Harrison, Flood & Duce, 2015). This essay will analyze the impact of Mobile Application planning on IT management.

Impact of Mobile Application on IT Plan

The current expectation from mobile applications is to perform as systems of involvement that offer consumers with accessibility to the data and functionality important to resolve issues and highlight instant demands. The responsibility that these entities of involvement offer is further improved through their ease and ubiquity of use and accessibility. Mobile application development planning in organizations has uncovered a massive prospect to generate a computing standard that decrease prices, augments productivity and facilitates stable business dealings hitherto limited to location dependent computer technology. Fast developments of mobile devices as well as the persistently augmenting potential of wireless systems have the capability to shift business models. This might well be the emergence of fragmented business of the future (Burkhart, 2013).

Mobile applications technology facilitates deep changes in structures in how firms acquire objectives through cost efficiency moving current automated corporate procedures beyond firms’ premises to whenever and wherever those procedures are involved most competitively. Mobile technology facilitates firms to acquire higher reach and influence new sorts of service delivery and communication, culminating in important productivity outcomes. Though the mobile technology is innovative, the fashion is old: facilitating higher integration of firms’ planning actions and how they are implemented (Clark, 2012).

Practitioners and academics have long researched the influence of organizational integration and expert knowledge regarding productivity. Lately, they have emphasized on the responsibility information technology (IT) has offered in enhancing integration and insight dissemination, offering a positive influence on productivity. There is currently a significant body of study indicating that innovative informational technologies raise organizational integration and a hugely held suggestion that an important foundation of the United States’ existing economic wealth is the reduction in integration prices. IT can become a catalyst in decreasing those prices. Mobile applications, encompassing speech facilitated applications, are the upcoming stage of this IT emergence, facilitating cost efficient organizational integration. Current day examples of integration are discovered in daily corporate actions (Flood, Duce, Iacob & Harrison, 2013):

• Organizing meetings
• Generating travel programs
• Utilizing a help kiosk
• Demanding and accepting costs
• Updating the position of sales leads
• Sustaining project programs
• Submitting service calls
• Placing parts or repairs orders

Both the firm and the person will get advantage from the options offered through mobile application. The firm will be capable to extend the influence of IT based firm integration beyond the join of wired systems. The person will be capable to organize individual procedures that need integration with other people and firms. Few practical instances of augmented employee performance due to mobile technology (Flood, Duce, Iacob & Harrison, 2013):

• Farmers of Iowa can utilize wireless Internet whilst in the field, facilitating them to shift planting and spraying programs based on shifting weather situations, watch goods prices and interact through email. Outcome: enhanced utilization of important time and the potential to adapt to fluctuating situations.
• A retail chain of pharmaceuticals wish to permit consumers to restore prescriptions through wireless gadgets. Alarms will acknowledge consumers when their prescriptions are completed. Outcome: Easier for consumers and less labor demands for the company.
• A real estate firm would like to offer accessibility to listing data, evaluate creditworthiness, realize what customers can afford, list down the options and draw a plan to visit the probable deals, whilst getting latest alerts regarding new lists emerging on the market. Outcome: enhanced consumer service, more competent utilization of employees’ financial savings, time and higher performance.

Critical Challenges

The shared nature of World Wide Web has been a benefit in offering organizations data and provisions, like help kiosk support on Information System requests, to consumers at their home or work, however it is not of restricted assistance when they are external to their home base. Moreover, there is a price to organizing a remote link to the Web. This price performs as prevention to remote utilization of business provisions. The link setup cost tag and perceived risk of security of attempting remote accessibility to home base are mostly regarded higher than the advantage warrants (Harrison, Flood & Duce, 2015).

It is ordinary to perceive project team participants at customers’ and opportunity sites utilizing Microsoft Hotmail via other firms’ computers to understand what is happening back within their own firms. The resistance to communicate with business services distinctly causes an important latency in the firm’s procedures. Distinct persons normally wait until they return on premises prior accessing their firms’ services. In a remote condition where the provision would be of greatest worth, people are compelled to record the data when they return to the firm. Workers will require pulling out a laptop back at the organization, remembering the background of the data and then stepping in the firm’s systems to carry on the procedure. Certainly, this is a worker concentrated and prone to error. It would be quite faster to conduct these jobs instantly at the time of the event. If workers had been capable to conduct those jobs regardless of situation, procedures would have been begun at the instance. Important participants of the firm as well as the consumer being offered would have recognized a job was initiated, thus there would be no blind spot of synchronization (Harrison, Flood & Duce, 2015).

Through wireless mobile provisions, businesses can eradicate the dependency on remote contexts and organize procedures to reliably conduct jobs where activities emerge. Moreover, there are diverse extents of prices when limited to landline technology, with the firm location being most costly. Firms can expect and regulate expenses better through wireless technology’s persistent costs. Since mobile application help is an emerging market area, the technology is currently accessible at affordable expenses and accessible to larger consumers. Due to the usage and purchasing patterns of the innovative gadgets, these gadgets actually are a personal technology with few gadgets rapidly obtaining popularity (Hickman & Smaltz, 2015).

Coping up with Challenges

IT executives, managers and software application developers who execute business procedures struggle with these confrontations as well as people who utilize them. People can try to recompense for uncomfortable procedures, however to be successful the form of the procedures must advantage both the firm and the people (Rochford, 2001). The procedures must be well minded with the jobs and conditions in which the people involve them. Although there is much functionality on the desktop personal computer, however integrating the tasks and integrating with others is awkward still. Integrating new gadgets into the life spreads access however does not essentially augment integration. To obtain enhanced integration and success, the services and applications accessible through the innovative gadgets must be offered through situation suitable communications. This refers the confrontation should take a suitable volume of effort and time, and the communication should not be demanding. This needs creating a harmony between companywide competencies on the hand and convenience of learning, utilize and conditional mach on the other (Hickman & Smaltz, 2015).

 

Incorporation of Mobile Application with IT Strategic Planning

Mobile application planning has become an important element of the way business end users perform. Provided the propagation of applications in the company, IT must shift beyond stationery application distribution to fulfill the application security, productivity and management demands of companies today. With the rise in demand of these applications, developers and designers need to have the techniques they require to create secure applications, IT must have the regulation and visibility they need to handle the complete application lifecycle, as well as end users need to have easy accessibility and link to the business assets they require. An effective mobile application management facilitates IT to develop or procure, safe, dynamically use and handle applications whilst securing end user confidentiality and driving application adoption (Islam & Islam, 2010).

End users obtain the applications they require to be creative without compromising on confidentiality, and application designers can offer the administration and safety aspects required by IT with their software. Through integration, businesses can conveniently handle internal, purchased and public applications throughout the whole lifecycle throughout employee owned, business owned and mutual devices from one core console. After making a choice to establish either a native or web base software for the mobile gadget the next important confrontation becomes how a business integrate this application to its back end IT applications (Islam & Islam, 2010).

The exclusive presentation confrontations faced by mobile application planning has basically shifted the manner business generate web applications. As a result, the integration becomes more complex to rapidly expose the current infrastructure to this innovative mobile channel of delivery, while reducing changing to the back end infrastructure. Businesses that are capable to acquire this rapidly will be able to reveal their conventional business approaches to completely demographics and devices. Using benefits of mobile application with the business procedures can be highly advantageous for the firm, however, to be effective, the business need to choose what it wish from its applications. The confrontation for several firms is without a precise strategy, applications do not actually facilitate the business to highlight critical areas like expense and time. Several of these general challenges can now be organized and automated, creating the business perform more competitively (Li & Vasilakos, 2015). As an example, within a paper based business context, it can regularly take more than week’s time to create a quotation for a customer. Mostly, these procedures do not actually take a week of job; however, aligning it with other tasks, circulating it to essential parties and gathering signatures acquire substantial amount of time and effort. With the latest technological advancements in mobile application developments, a mobile application can generate a template, facilitating workers to fulfill a customer, define their demands and offer a solution the next day, if not rapidly. The time from offering proposal to shutting down expedited, directing towards a better rate of success.  The significance of integrating applications within the IT management of a firm is two-sided. First, integration enables more competencies for the workers, associates and consumers; secondly, it facilitates the business to acquire more visibility and an enhanced feel of information and business procedure conveniently, rather than trying to stay up to date via a paper record. A successful mobile application integration strategy assists to organize and refine procedures for workers at every level within the firm, as well as clients (IT – Business Alignment Why We Stumble and the Path Forward, 2013).

A huge range of mobile applications are currently accessible for every platform, both for specific industry and in general. As capabilities and technology emerges, the depth of probable solutions evolves. Nevertheless, even with phenomenal development in the application industry, situations still evolve when a current platform is not the best possible solution for the business. in place of aligning the procedures to match a common application, the optimal course of activity is to create an application that is customized to the particular demands.

An effective way for creating and executing an application is adopting the mobile application establishment life cycle (IT – Business Alignment Why We Stumble and the Path Forward, 2013):

• Planning: use business experts and consultants to define the vision of the application and probable aspects
• Create and link: create the app with customer and server
• Test: performance and functional testers assess the app and define whether it is fulfilling the projected demands
• Release: after testing, the app is to be released to the users
• Evaluate: the released application owners assess analytics and develop next phases

Therefore, IT managers need to be more process oriented; they need to adjust more directly with the demands of the organization. It is a way that CIO’s have both preached and heard for more than twenty years. However it has proven to be highly elusive in spite of continuing attempts through the firm, and enhancing business as well as IT adjustment still emerges virtually all Top CIO preferences market listings. It is believed that the biggest single obstruction to beating the misalignment challenge of IT and business are strict organization technology platforms which cannot be created around the way a company functions, setting up business and IT for contradiction and sub optimal outcomes rather than optimization and alignment (Jose & Castillo, 2014).

Conclusion

Mobile application planning is the future of corporate world. Smart devices and tablet market is on the rise and corporations are eventually getting on board. Nevertheless, selecting the optimum way is a challenging job for business merely moving out into mobile region. If a business desire to generate mobile application for its operations, it will have two ways: generate native applications or mobile web applications. The choice hugely relies on the demands of a company and the effective integration of its IT management. In a nut shell, the data offered in this paper discussed few critical aspects that need to be considered while studying mobile application planning in context of IT management.

However, for now, mobile technology is majorly user concentrated and is still at a budding phase in organizations. Organizations that increase the degree of their mobile involvement provisions stand to get advantage through disrupting markets and getting users away from firms who do not. Human resource is also a major aspect of organizational mobility. Smart devices and tablets have broken the strings on PC bound performance techniques empowering workers to carry their official work in their pockets. There is a robust business condition for firms to device and execute a mobility strategy. The primary and most certain advantage is easy involvement with consumers and workers. Organizational mobile application planning in support features like Finance, and HR can assist the convenience of utilization for workers through online enablement of jobs like reimbursement, attendance, payroll, support desks and travel planning. For consumers confronting tasks like Services, Marketing, and Sales, mobile applications can assist workers link better with clients and assist in faster problem solution. With respect to sales, it assists the workers to monitor and sustain leads and acquire real time efficient data for clients, it could assist in buying through enabling connectivity via multiple channels. Therefore, an effective mobile application planning enables firms’ IT operations to perform with increased productivity and efficiency that could facilitate the entire business to attain substantial results through the current technology of mobile application development. However, cautious planning and integration is needed to incorporate the technology effectively and productively in a firm’s business fabric so that it can acquire maximum benefits.

 

References

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Harrison, R., Flood, D., & Duce, D. (2015). Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model. Journal Of Interaction Science, 1(1).

Hickman, G., & Smaltz, D. (2015). Information Technology Planning Approach and Concepts. In The Healthcare Information Technology Planning Fieldbook: Tactics, Tools and Templates for Building Your IT Plan (1st ed.). HIMSS.

Islam, M., & Islam, M. (2010). Mobile Application and Its Global Impact. International Journal Of Engineering & Technology, 10(6), 73-78.

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Jose, F., & Castillo, M. (2014). Drivers of Mobile Application Acceptance by Consumers: A Meta Analytical Review. International Journal Of E-Services And Mobile Applications, 6(3), 1-14.

Li, Y., & Vasilakos, A. (2015). Multi-perspective virtualization and software-defined infrastructure framework for wireless access networks. The Journal Of SPECIAL ISSUES On Mobility Of Systems, Users, Data And Computing, 20(1), 19-31.

Rochford, T. (2001). The Impact of Mobile Application Technology on Today’s Workforce (1st ed.). iConverse. Retrieved from http://www.wirelessdevnet.com/library/iconverse1.pdf