What is a Mobile Center of Excellence & why might your business need one.
Mobile is more and more a standard format for business and personal interaction. Developing an effective mobile app requires clear planning and skilled expertise in the mobile software setting. (You can find some important suggestions for planning your app development here.)
In this article we’re going to cover a topic of interest to those who are looking to build out mobile apps in volume as part of their business offering or are planning on contracting with a mobile developer. The topic is What is a Mobile Center of Excellence (MCoE), how does it work, and why is it beneficial.
What is a Mobile Center of Excellence?
A MCoE is a company agreement and philosophy on creating and maintaining mobile apps, typically centered around a team. While a MCoE is best suited for companies with more than one app, it can also work well with a single app. A MCoE can drastically improve app development by setting up processes to manage app builds and ongoing care and improvements.
So, what exactly would an MCoE be responsible for?
A lot to say the least. A few examples include:
- Budgeting and prioritizing projects
- Management of mobile development vendors and service providers
- App lifecycle management
- Best practices for user experiences
- Agile development with rapid release schedules
- Security and data governance policies and practices
- Cloud strategies
- Success metrics
How does a Mobile Center of Excellence Work?
A MCoE does 6 core things.
- It provides strategic alignment that allows the whole team to understand and have clear goals for the app in development.
- Standards are created such as testing protocols as well as security and compliance guidelines.
- There is centralized expertise and support meaning that the best developers and designers are all in one place working together and learning from one another. A library with expertise elements that can be reused over and over is also able to be created.
- Collaboration thrives here as IT works with operations and marketing team members.
- Innovation advances as new technologies are explored, and prototypes are created.
- There is continuous improvement throughout the app development process. App performance and feedback are monitored, workflows speed up, and solutions are created based on analytics.
What are the benefits of having a Mobile Center of Excellence?
There are several big benefits to having a MCoE. The first is having a consistent quality of apps being developed. This is made possible by the establishment of standards for development, design, testing, and deployment. Your company is able to produce a great app for every single client. The standards developed also reduce vulnerabilities in software and thus improve app security.
A MCoE is also great for maintaining cost efficiency as it saves resources by utilizing reusable components like libraries, systems, and centralized tools. It reduces the duplication of effort to save your company time and money. By streamlining the development process, a MCoE also provides a faster time to market for apps.
Overall, having a Mobile Center of Excellence provides faster problem resolution, updates, and continuous improvement based on user feedback. All of this in turn creates strong mobile apps that run smoothly and make users happy.
Curious to see what Logic’s MCoE can do for you?
