Luckily, responsible app developers will want to put in the hard yards with you to establish, firstly, whether you need one and, if you do, what you need it to do. We all grow so accustomed to seeing our businesses exclusively from the inside - that explaining ourselves from scratch to outsiders (however tedious and time-consuming it might sound) can prove as useful to us as it is to the developers.
Because so few of us understand the highly technical language and concepts of apps, it’s tempting to see the technology as something to be fearful of, or at least worried by. Truth is, handled well, technology is just a facilitator.
To illustrate, at a recent event on this topic, delegates were told about an app which had been developed for a huge global payment processing business (10k employees, $20bn market value, $3bn revenues). Given the business’s nature, the whole point of the app-in-development was to help customers all over the world instantly access their financial information. Only at a disastrously late stage did it become clear that this would be impossible. The business’s very safety-conscious but fairly archaic infrastructure meant the data which the app needed to access was stashed in old-school mainframes, which were as secure as they were inaccessible. At which point, and in double-quick time, the developers began a completely new project to help the business completely re-engineer its internal systems so that the app was able to integrate all this out-of-bounds data.
A reminder that – regardless of scale – introducing an app might involve a thorough audit of ALL your processes and protocols. (And, as with any audit, you need to be prepared to deal with whatever it uncovers.)