We got our hands on an Ios 6 Iphone to observe the issue first hand and noticed that when you swipe your finger vertically to start a scroll, it takes painfully long for the event to get registered and the scroll to begin.

We dug deep into the problem and came up with a solution which not only solves the problem but also lightens up the application by reducing considerable amount of java script events.

Now the scrolling is buttery smooth and the application works a lot faster than before.

As it turns out, I’ve only downloaded and installed Portal Server (instead of Portal Enable or Portal + WCM). So, I have to go back and download WCM and re-run Installation Manager to install WCM. Now I am open for e-business!

It is confusing that you are able to view and edit libraries, but don’t be fooled! When you notice that the New button is missing from Library Explorer, that means you don’t have WCM installed.

2012 caused a bit of embarrassment to the Mayans, didn’t it? The world didn’t quite end, although a lot of people did party on the 20^th of December like it would.

Given that the famed Mayans could be so grossly incorrect in their predictions, I’m putting my toe on the line and making predictions for enterprise mobility for 2013. (Disclaimer: Predictions may not be as apocalyptic, but are definitely world-changing if you think about it).

Further increase in BYOD adoption by companies

We’ve seen that many organizations around the world have started transposing their focus toward enterprise mobility. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) would not increase because organizations adopt it, but because employees would force it. Everyone wants to bring their own smartphone to office. And organizations would hate to be the pigeon who looks away to pretend the cat is not upon them.

Strategy, not just tactics

Mobile apps are being created nowadays to cater to a lot of business functions including HR, Sales force CRM and field assets. At a time like this, organizations now are at a juncture where they have to decide on the strategy of their mobile initiatives, and not just what app is needed. Defining an overall strategy and roadmap of mobility and then implementing this strategy is the next big thing for organizations in 2013.

Governmental organizations go mobile

Till now, we’ve seen that only private and non-governmental organizations are taking to mobile adoption. Government departments are usually the last to adopt new technologies, but in mobility, they’ll make an exception. This year, watch out for the large number of governmental agencies and departments adopting mobility.

Mobile app management on the rise

The first part of challenges that we have seen over the years as an enterprise mobility solutions provider is creation of apps. Organizations, in the rush to get apps out to the market, have tended to overlook the bigger picture about management of these apps that they’ve created. Mobile app management will be among the bigger concerns for CXO’s in 2013.

Enterprise mobility will start fusing with Information Management

That’s right. Big Data and Mobility are no longer two distinct identities. A report by Gartner showed that Big Data and Enterprise Mobility are two of the biggest focus areas for most CXO’s in 2012. And this trend will continue in 2013 as well.  Mobility will incorporate features like business intelligence, visual analytics, graphs and charts and reports. It’s going to be all-encompassing data solutions in 2013 in mobility.

The cloud becomes bigger

Cloud computing and mobile in the cloud is already one of the biggest areas of interest for both, vendors and for customers. The flexibility, convenience and comparatively lower costs mean that majority of organizations prefer their mobile solutions are going to be hosted on the cloud. 2013 only points to more of the mobile and cloud.

That’s my stab at the predictions for enterprise mobility in 2013. And while the Mayans did go wrong, I would be pretty sure that a lot of other enterprise mobility experts would bet on these predictions coming true.

Streebo has transposed its focus around Enterprise Mobility and Information Management (Big Data) over the last few years. Our experience, quality and most importantly, our successful work in these practices were, to be best put, stored on our earlier website. But with the passage of time, we all felt the need for a more powerful and impactful platform wherefrom we could showcase our work to the world.

We wanted a single platform where we could exhibit our industry, technical and technological know-how and expertise. The project was initiated keeping in mind the top objectives of branding, face-lifting and showcasing the entire spectrum of our products and solutions.

More than anything else, this website is an indicator, a sample of our work. We consider ourselves to be UI/UX user experience experts across multiple channels, and this reflects in the layout, look-and-feel and the modern features of the website. Our top notch user experience team has left no stone unturned in getting the slickest UI possible for our website, while ensuring that it doesn’t go overboard.

In the Enterprise Mobility practice sections of the website, you may see details about our practices on our website. Learn about our product, the Mobile App Management Platform and about our solutions around enterprise-ready mobile apps. Learn more about our consulting services around IBM WebSphere Portal, IBM Web Experience Factory and IBM Worklight. You can also read up on our training courses on these and more. You may refer to our success stories, case studies, data sheets and webinars on mobility at our Resource Center.

In the Information Management practice sections of our new website, you can learn about our Business Intelligence, Master Data Management (MDM), Data Warehousing (DW), Data Quality and Analytics offerings. Learn about our consulting in Kalido, IBM Cognos and Tibco Spotfire, or read up on our Pharma and Retail industry solutions. You may also refer to our case studies and videos on IM at our Resource Center.

And if you just want to know more about our company, feel free to go through the rest of the website.

We are still adding newer pages, content, case studies and showcases of our work to the website. What you see right now is just a culmination of our ideas and our outlook. And as much as we love our final product, we have already begun working on the next iteration of our website. We invite your feedback on the current site. Feel free to drop a comment below, or drop us an email at info@streebo.com. We appreciate and value your feedback as it is you who is the final judge of our work.

Streebo offers many thanks to our team for bringing this to a successful launch. To know more about our offerings, you may contact us at info@streebo.com

Often managers and leaders encounter situations that demand them to jump into greater depth than what should be the ideal case. This often leads to micromanagement. The reasons can be multiple e.g. people who have been assigned tasks are not productive or skilled, tasks are not well-defined, new decisions need to be made, etc.

Micromanagement implies management of each and every activity going on in a project or a program, and often leads to spending more time in managing administrative portions – hence most of the time is actually spent on the tasks at hand instead of creating a solid process base that can be used repeatedly in future. We see many inventions around us that are live examples of automation (read “time-saving machines”) e.g. as small as a remote control or a water pipe; as huge as an aircraft or a satellite; and as specific to this topic as a computer. Wherever I have seen micromanagement, I have observed many failures; short term and mostly long-term growth and scalability related.

A growing organization’s focus should ideally be on delegation and macro-management that cultivates a culture of creativity, ownership, accountability, self-sufficiency and interdependence. This concept allows the senior roles to really focus more on strategy and lesser on operations – a big chunk of what can be produced/viewed through systems and processes, may those be automated or manual tools. Instead of focusing on handling most of the day-to-day operations, this valuable time can be spent on defining automated processes around the same – this ensures scalability of roles who have lesser time-bandwidth.

Additionally, this allows people with other roles to exercise their own authorities and creativity in the areas they own – hence a growth pattern follows. Of course, everyone in this model would need to contribute by utilizing their full potential. This model might not work for average people (specifically speaking about delivering cutting/bleeding edge solutions) – it is required to have smart people who can balance methodological approach with clever workarounds in order to achieve goals in almost all the situations.

The senior roles can then assume the responsibility of ensuring that the culture and the high level system runs without road blocks with an added responsibility of participating in bouncing off ideas in situations where people encounter “thinking road-blocks” to solve a problem.

The key is the continuous thought process – everybody needs to keep their thought-engines running all the time as opposed to just working day in and day out and stick to a project plan – which actually they need to do – but the idea is to keep thinking on how one can convert large chunk of tedious monotonous tasks into a repeatable process. E.g. a data clean-up job required for 1,000 records in 10 days can be done in at least three ways:

1) Visit each record and clean up one by one – 100 records a day

2) Analyze all patterns and implement a utility that cleans up the data 100% accurately – takes around 10 days to complete and 4-5 days to test, fix and handle exceptions

3) Analyze a set of patterns and implement a utility in 3-4 days that cleans 50-60% data and the rest of the data can be cleaned up manually in around 3-4 days (to cover exceptions) and wait for some future spare time to fix this utility to be used in future

I would “generally” adopt #3 (refer Kaizen)- this saves a couple of days from the current task at hand plus produces a utility that can save 50% of the time to achieve recurring tasks of the same pattern. This concept can be used to set-up any recurring process, a tool, a standard document, a methodology, etc.

In short, before jumping into any task, we should pause for a while and ask questions to ourselves such as: can we automate this?; can we convert this into a repeatable process?; how much extra time would we require for this?; etc. Once the process is destined to be defined, it is important to set-up a workable audit process with defined accountabilities – people or process that ensure the owners of each area perform for what they are accountable for.

I strongly believe that if every individual in an organization follows this concept, it will just not achieve increased productivity and quality in the shorter term, but can also produce great leaders in the longer run.

Mobile Application Development

Mobility is the need of the hour. I’ve been seeing many challenges that customers have shared with me over enterprise mobility and going mobile, and a few certain patterns in these challenges have started to emerge. The problems, issues, challenges or pain points revolve a lot around budget, timelines, indecisive management, outsourcing challenges and in-house development effort. But mainly, a lot of customers ask me about what mobile application development technology to use for their mobile strategy and initiatives.

I’ve helped a lot of customers take their existing applications, content and processes on to mobile platforms for a variety of platforms like the iOS, Android, BB, Windows Mobile, etc. and for a variety of smartphones and tablets. And I’ve learned along the way about why choosing the right mobile development platform is so difficult, not to mention time-consuming. Everyone in a team has their own take on what to use, based on their previous experiences, and there are many options available in the market. Cost also is a factor and so is proven expertise of development teams on a particular platform.

In this first part of the 2-post series, I shall take you through some of the major challenges that most companies face in choosing a mobile development technology. In the second part, I plan to cover a technology solution to these challenges.

Challenge 1 – The Lifecycle

To have a technology or tool or platform that covers the entire life cycle of a mobile application, right from developing, running and managing apps. A huge majority of the tools and technologies available in the market today only cater to one part of the entire mobile app development life cycle or the other. You can either use it to create apps, or for deployment of apps on to an app store, or for app management purposes. But these platforms do not cater to the entire life cycle. This means that it becomes necessary to choose multiple tools for each part of the mobile app life cycle.

Challenge 2 – Native, Hybrid or Web

To have a technology that supports creation of native, hybrid and HTML5 web apps. Depending on the requirements of business or consumer applications, it may be any of the 3 types of apps. Mostly, when device-specific features like camera, accelerometer, etc. are to be used, or there is need for high res quality graphics (such as games), then native development is chosen. If there is need only for high web connectivity, then web development is chosen. And typically, when there is a mix of these, then hybrid app development is chosen. So at a juncture where the type of mobile app is still flexible to three types, it becomes necessary to purchase tools for each type.

Challenge 3 – Cross-platform

To have a mobile development platform that supports effective cross-platform development support. Developers or development organizations have no control over the type of devices that are used by people. And there is no clear leader in the mobile handset market space either. Also, the ability to create engaging user experience across platforms is needed. So cross-platform development support is very essential.

Challenge 4 – Backends

To have a mobile application development platform that enables easy and quick integration with a variety of backend systems ensuring scalability and also enabling offline authentication and support. With so many legacy systems, DB backends and MS systems in place, it is a headache to find a technology that is virtually backend-agnostic, in the sense that it allows integration to a variety of backends.

Challenge 5 – Skills

To have to recruit retain a development and QA team that has different skill-sets (for different platforms) and to have to purchase various different collaboration tools. Each mobile platform, be it the iOS, Android, BB, Windows Mobile, etc.; and each device – iPhone, iPads, BBs, Notes, Tablets, etc; – all need developers and testers with specific skill-sets. This means that companies need to hire more people for the same work, simply because they need cross-platform apps.

Challenge 6 – Control

To have control over app distribution after deployment. Let’s say you have developed your iOS and your Android and your BB and your Windows mobile apps. Let’s say you have your apps for the  iPhone and the iPads and the Android smartphones and tablets and all figured out and developed. After all this, you need to deploy this to various stores – the Apple App Store, Google Play, BB App Store and Windows Marketplace. And then the headache – automatic updates locally cached HTML/JS resources to installed apps, push notifications, remotely disabling apps – the works. App management and control is a whole subject in itself, really.

So these are the major challenges that companies face in choosing a mobile application development technology. In my next post, I’ll talk to you about a solution for these problems. Watch this space for more!

• IBM Worklight is a new and advanced mobile application development platform that helps develop, connect, run and manage HTML5 web, hybrid and native applications.
• IBM Worklight is similar to RAD, in the sense that it allows more control over the actual code; while Web Experience Factory has in-built integration builders and profiling. Collectively, WEF and Worklight can save time and effort if developers use WEF to do the web services and integration, and use Worklight to develop the app structure.
• Utilizing WEF provides out of the box builders for Worklight to connect to numerous external applications. However, Worklight provides for a few app management features that are not default with WEF. In fact, Worklight actually provides a small MDM (Mobile Device Management) solution which has features from App updates to app enabling/disabling.
• Another feature of the IBM Worklight kit is that it ships along with Mobile Browser Simulator, which is useful if developers don’t want to install Android Emulators or don’t have Apple Macs for Xcode.
• Worklight already has PhoneGap/Cordova implementation, thus Device features can easily be used, and it also allows you to write your own custom plug-ins easier.
• With the need also for native development which is not catered to by WEF, developers can replace a HTML based page into a complete native driven page within the application thus making your app a complete hybrid mix.
• Worklight is Dojo savvy, thus making it possible to utilize client-side aggregation introduced in WEF 8.0 based on Dojo.

So in brief, existing Portal customers will always find it quickest and easiest to go mobile leveraging WEF and build browser based mobile apps, and then later on leveraging IBM Worklight to create hybrid and native apps.