The Zen philosophical riddle about the sound of one hand clapping loosely parallels the need for mobile applications to interoperate. One hand alone implies the sound two clapping together would make. But while intent exists, it is useless without the complement of a second hand. Add many more hands clapping together and you get thunderous applause.
So it is with mobile applications. They are powerful alone but only make noise together. For example, integrate a mobile self-service portal with incident and change management, and everything from work orders to facility requests to network outages can be triaged, diagnosed, and resolved remotely. Embed a simple asset look-up feature in a standard trouble ticket, and the trouble ticket becomes a historical account of all issues related to that asset. Add team calendaring to a group reassignment, and the request becomes actionable because it will only be delivered to on-call users.
This ability to interoperate is almost as integral a part of the mobile experience as the device itself. To be effective, it must be no more difficult to integrate multiple applications than it is to mobilize an individual application.
By: BMC Software