Bco6185 Mobile And Executive Computing Assessment Answers

Discuss, compare and/or contrast different perspectives, present arguments supporting the purpose of the paper.

Answer:

Introduction:

Today technology is changing rapidly and it is becoming powerful than before. The advancement of technology has become prevalent in almost every sector of business. Not only the business itself, technology is also having impact on the way customer interact and communicate with the enterprise (Berghaus and Back 2014). As the technology has become affordable, it is now much more accessible than before. The use of smart phone has now almost become a norm rather than something to show off.  With the increase in the use of the smart phones, customer are now more into obtaining the service through the mobile phones as it is lot more convenient and portable. Due to this consumer now expects enterprise to offer services through mobile application. In order to meet this expectation enterprise are now taking this approach as one of the important aspect of the enterprise success plan.

The report will include sections like components of designing mobile application containing discussion on the major components for mobile application development, platform and technologies for integrating each of the components. Along with that a case study has also been included that discusses the adoption of the mobile solution for improving customer service.

Components of designing of the mobile application for the enterprise business solution:

The development of the application is consists of several components for which several tools and components is required. No matter what the application is intended for these components are to some extent similar except for few changes depending on the scope and range of services the application offers.

The components are the following:

• OS or the operating system :

It is the first and the foremost requirement for the application. Without the OS the application will not run on the smartphone of the consumers. It controls the hardware and the software of a particular smartphone or computing devices

• Database :

Another important component for the mobile applications development is the database. Database in its simplest term can be thought as the collection of data or container of data. It stores data in the form of table which is a logical abstraction or representation of the data to the viewers. Each entry in the table is identified with the row and column number.

• Backend server :

One of the important aspect of the mobile application development is to have the facility of backend server. It basically stores the application related data. It helps the customer to retrieve application related data if the application crashes. Without the option of the backend server the application developer or the organization will not be able to provide this facility to the customer.

• Design of user interface :

It is the most important factor for designing application as it provides the interface through which the user interact with the application. Hence the interface had to be top notch besides making it simple and easy to follow.

Platform and technologies for each of the components:

Operating system:

Platform for the operating system:

Now there are several platform available depending on the target devices. For mobile devices the major platforms available are android by Google, ios by Apple and windows mobile by Microsoft.

Apart from the dedicated mobile or pc based application web based applications are also very popular. There are also several framework for web based application development such as. Hybrid or cross platform applications development some popular frameworks are PhoneGap, J2ME Polish.

According to the recent report, Gartner has claimed that more than 50 percent of mobile apps in 2016 were deployed in the hybrid platform (gratner.com).

Database:

Platform for the database design:

 The platform it supports are Linux, Windows, MacOs and Solaris. Other notable platform is this regard is the DB2 by IBM.

Technologies for the Database:

Several technologies are available for the database design. However the leading and the most popular platform is available is the MySQL. It is open source relational database management system owned by oracle. In order to manipulate the database and the data contained in the database, the programming language that is most preferred is the PHP as it integrates well with the MySQL database and offers better control on the data.

Bank of Finland, which happens to be most important bank in Finland, is part of the European System of Central Banks and the Eurosystem. It serves as the national monitory authority for the banks in the Finland.

In order to felicitate the payment system for the banks and serve the customer while doing the payment, the bank of Finland has deployed a central payment system with the simulator is designed with the MySQL server.   

Backend server:

Platform for deploying the backend server:

There are couple of choices for deploying the backend server. It is possible to opt for either custom or the cloud server. In the custom server it is possible to set the server and then host it in the backend. However the process is time consuming as it requires to set up the dedicated server, then static IP address need to be assigned and even the maintenance of the server have to be done on the by the developer (Ehrenhard et al. 2014). However if the server is not maintained properly the server will not be able to execute properly. Hence the cloud server is the most preferred option as there is no need for the manual maintenance from the developer side.

The cloud server is the one stop solution for the various range of application.  It is not only affordable but flexible too. Hence cloud server is most preferred among the developers for the application development. Followings are some of the most popular platform for the cloud server:

Amazon AWS:

AWS SDK is available for both the iOS and Android. It is very popular for deploying server for the mobile application. The advantages of the AWS SDK is that it follows very well documentation style and also provides in-built library that is helpful for the design of the server.

Google App Engine:

This is standard choice too. It is very easy in terms of managing and offers scalability according to the traffic of the application. Hence it is scalable according to the number of clients or customer the application needs to support.

Windows Azure:

Another popular option which is also very effective if the application is built for the windows mobile platform. It even offers the options to provide authentication for the application users and also offers the facility to provide push notification for the iOS users.

Technologies for the backend server:

The technologies for the back end server deployment depends on the language which is used for the server (Legner, Urbach and Nolte 2016). There are various language available for the server deployment and so are the technologies. The list is described in the table format:

Language	Framework or the technologies
PHP	1. Zend Framework 2. Symfony 3. Yii 4. Laravel
Python	The most popular and versatile framework for Python is Django
Ruby	The popular framework for Ruby is Ruby on Rails and Sinatra

 

User interface design:

Platform:

Some popular platform for the design of the user interface design are Sketch, Zeplin.

Some popular tools for the user interface design are the Photoshop, illustrator and Flinto.

Technology:

For the web based mobile application the most popular option is the CSS or cascaded style sheet which is often used with the HTML for the styling the content of the web application.  

In order to develop the application all of these components are required to integrate properly. Proper choice of the tools are not only necessary but mandatory for the successful application development. Although there are several tools for designing each of the component for the application development, some tools are standard and popular as these tolls offers effective means for the application design and deployment. Hence only standard and popular have been described here.

A case study for the companies adopting mobile business solution:

The mobile solutions for serving the customer is becoming more and more popular and now almost have become a standard for the companies that want to compete in the market with a dedicated customer service that is fast, accurate and less complex. One such company is OpenTable, a restaurant booking company based in 1998. It was one of the leading companies in this sector. However the company was observing a decline in the restaurant in the revenue as well as in the number of customer booking table with the site. When investigated, it was found in research that a major change was needed in the way the company was working at the time of the research was conducted. It was found that as the company at that time was only having the facility to book restaurant through the website. However it was found in investigation, market report and survey, there were preference among the customer to use mobile application for booking table and ordering food from restaurant (Forbes.com, 2018). Hence the company for the first time launched the exclusive application both for the ios and android, in 2012 as those platforms were two of the major platform available at that time. Later in 2015, when windows entered into the mobile platform, a windows version of the application also got released. After the introduction of the mobile application for serving the customer, the company reported a significant growth in the revenue with 50% higher customer base that booked table through the OpenTable. The numbers were published in the 2014 annual report of OpenTable after the introduction of mobile app in 2012.

Cost factor for the designing the mobile application for the enterprise mobile solution:

Requirement and feature of the application:

The requirement and the feature of the application has a huge potential in determining the cost of the application. It is the initial step of the application design where the goal of the business and customer service strategy is built.

Complexity of the application:

The complexity of the application is another factor that determines the cost of the application. For example an application just wants to show products to the users it will obviously cost less than the application which offers some additional features like payment, delivery, tracking of product and any other feature the company wants to add.

Platform:

The platform for which the application is being made influence the cost as well. The same application developed for iOS cost more than the application developed for android. This is because each platform follows different strategy for revenue through the application and different technology for app integration.

Security:

The security of the application is another factor that determines the cost of the application development. The application might contain several sensitive information like payment details, account information and several personal data (Lyberopoulos et al. 2016). Now in order to secure the data each application considers its own set of data which is cost dependent. For example if the application integrates private cloud instead of public cloud it will improve the security, but the cost will be higher for private cloud.

Success factor:

Simplicity in design:

The design should be simple enough to make it easy for the customer to follow along and find the desired features they are looking for

User interface:

The user interface should be attractive as it makes the initial impression which is important for making them use the application

Device integration:

The app should be integrate well with variety of devices so that customer gets seamless access around different device

Feedback and resolution:

The consumer might give feedback about issues of accessing the application and how well these issues are resolved by the developer team is an important factor for the success of the application designed for the mobile solution to serve the customer.

Conclusion:

The paper concludes that in order to be relevant in today’s market that is driven by constant innovation and technology, it is important to serve the need of the customer with services that integrates technology for improving the quality and service time as this is the demand of the customer. However there are several cost factors like requirements of application, choice of platforms and level of security applied and other factors as well already discussed in the above sections. Not all application are efficient to improve the mobile business solutions for the enterprise. There are some success factors like ease of using applications, simplicity, device integrity and response to feedback to the customer query. All of these factors are important to integrate to create a successful mobile business solution for serving the customer.

Reference:

Berghaus, S. and Back, A., 2014. Adoption of Mobile Business Solutions and its Impact on Organizational Stakeholders.

Ehrenhard, M., Wijnhoven, F., van den Broek, T. and Stagno, M.Z., 2017. Unlocking how start-ups create business value with mobile applications: Development of an App-enabled Business Innovation Cycle. Technological forecasting and social change, 115, pp.26-36.

Forbes.com. (2018). [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/companies/opentable/#28e267bccdd3 [Accessed 18 Sep. 2018].

https://www.gartner.com/doc/3348018/magic-quadrant-mobile-app-development

Legner, C., Urbach, N. and Nolte, C., 2016. Mobile business application for service and maintenance processes: Using ex post evaluation by end-users as input for iterative design. Information & Management, 53(6), pp.817-831.

Lyberopoulos, G., Theodoropoulou, H., Filis, K. and Mesogiti, I., 2016. Smart Mobile Ecosystem Security: Existing Solutions, MNO Requirements and Business Model. In Information Sciences and Systems 2015 (pp. 137-146). Springer, Cham.

Tai, Y.T., Huang, C.H. and Chuang, S.C., 2016. The construction of a mobile business application system for ERP. Kybernetes, 45(1), pp.141-157.

Winter, J., Battisti, S., Burström, T. and Luukkainen, S., 2018. Exploring the success factors of mobile business ecosystems. International Journal of Innovation and Technology Management, 15(03), p.1850026.

www.gartner.com. (2018). [online] Available at: