As we discussed in  Meeting the Relentless Mobile App Demand of the Enterprise, the enterprise thirst for mobile apps will far outstretch what enterprise internal development teams will be in a position to produce.

Developers will need every edge provided to them in order to help their enterprise success. And there’s no doubt that IT teams need to be agile and move as quickly as possible and this is as true with mobile development than anywhere. By not being able to meet the increasing demand for enterprise mobile apps, enterprises can’t be as effective and productive as they need to be. That creates substantial business opportunity costs.

Here are some ways I think enterprises can improve the mobile app development efforts, in addition to what Gartner suggested, detailed in our part 1:

Adopt agility. Enterprise IT is changing rapidly. The tight collaboration with development and operations teams, drive for agility, continuous development and other approaches that are increasingly mainstream are pushing applications out into production, and updating existing ones, more quickly than ever was before possible. Not only do successful DevOps organizations have short app backlogs, they are more innovative. Our special guest contributor Matt Selheimer wrote am insightful series that culminated with DevOps with purpose: ACT-ing with greater agility that details how to be more agile through DevOps practices.

The more agile your organization, the more swiftly they can re-adjust and move always be producing the apps that matter and those that will drive the greatest business impact.

Leverage APIs. Instead of building apps from scratch and creating more data silos, take a page from Gartner’s advice on mode 1 which is building infrastructure and APIs. Most existing large enterprises have enormous data and application and database silos. One effective way, when possible, to unleash that data and reduce silos is through APIs. APIs are the most straightforward way to build the capabilities the business needs through    extending the utility of existing applications.

Leverage the cloud to the hilt. Whenever possible, it’s time to go cloud first. It’s time to gate legacy on-premises systems and maintain them until they can be displaced. This will include public, private, and hybrid cloud architectures – but the more rapidly legacy on-premises systems can be retired the more agile IT can be.

Our post, Three tips for maximizing efficiency in the age of the hybrid cloud environment, provides insight into how to manage hybrid cloud environments.

Choose cloud and development platforms carefully. There are a number of other critical platform questions, too: Can the data be provided wherever the user needs it? Does it help alleviate security, privacy, and regulatory compliance demands? And can the platform help with role-based identity management and provide for auditable access control?  All of these things being provided as utility help expedite application development and clear your app backlog.

The more people in your organization who can develop the better. This could come in the form of training non-developers to build some of the app capabilities they need in cloud platforms and with very high level coding tools. It’s easier now than ever before for anyone to create business process workflows with hardly any code.

Be MVP lean. The Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a viable way to identify mobile apps that are in need and will likely provide the most immediate value. Simply defined, the MVP consists of what is only necessary to get the task done and little more. If the app is successful, it can be improved upon and iterated based on user feedback and business need.

One way DevOps helps to achieve this is through splicing development time so many apps can be worked on incrementally, and the MVP concept is ideal for this type of workflow. It makes it easy to re-prioritize apps and new incremental work on existing ones based on pressing business priorities.

I’m sure there are other ways to help make mobile app development efforts both effective and strategic to the enterprise rather than fire-fighting app demand. If you have any ideas, we’d like to hear them in the comments below. What strategies, tools, techniques are your organization using to increase mobile app development efficiency?