With Enterprise Apps, Sometimes Less is More

Guest author Ian Fisher is CTO of Taptera, a mobile-app development company.

Recently, I found myself having a very familiar conversation: How many features should you put in a single mobile app? This topic comes up constantly in the enterprise mobility space, largely due to the huge influx of new users and development going on right now.

The conversation usually goes something like this: “We want an app that lets us easily find our coworkers’ contact info. And it needs to be able to book conference rooms. We also need it to send reports to employees’ managers as well as let them approve expenses.”

Hearing a list of requirements like that, some people envision one app. Some envision four. Having had this conversation constantly for several years, I can safely say that you want four. While one monolithic office-management app can sound appealing, breaking it into small parts has many tangible benefits.

Pick One Thing, Do It Well

Think of your favorite mobile apps. I’m guessing that nearly all of them have a specific function that they do really, really well. I use individual apps on a daily basis for email, project tracking, app deployment, note taking, personal to-do lists and file management, to name a few.