Over the years, enterprise software applications, including IT service management systems, have become bloated with unnecessary features and now invariably follow the 90-10 rule: 90 percent of users rely on 10 percent of the features. This unfortunate reality has had limited impact on PC application usage because it is relatively easy for users to ignore the 90 percent of an application they don’t need. Mobile applications, however, don’t work that way. In fact, if an application includes more than the required 10 percent of the features that people use on a handheld, the entire app becomes 100 percent useless because too much data can have a negative impact on application performance. Any feature that is not needed, therefore, deters the usage of a mobile device.
Making mobile applications role based and user configurable is essential, but difficult. Why? The 10 percent needed by each user is different and often based on the contextual information — time of day, day of week, location, or priorities — as described earlier. The wrong way to solve the 10-percent problem is to do what PC application owners do: find a one-size-fits-all configuration or “custom configure” the application for each group and role. The right way is to give control of the mobile application to end users. Only they know exactly what they need and exactly how it should be formatted. All other solutions are untenable. This approach, combined with elements of machine learning to recommend optimal configurations, is the Holy Grail of mobile computing. The executive’s business application, for example, must consist only of the escalations, approvals, and dashboards he or she needs, while the problem coordinator’s app should receive only relevant problem summaries, alerts, and skill-based routing details. Most importantly, configuring and deploying role-based applications should not require incremental time or resources, regardless of how many end users or devices are supported.
By: BMC Software