Smartphones and tablets are flooding today’s workspaces.

Vanity? Perhaps, perhaps not.

When the shift to smart-devices in the office fully emerged two years ago (2010), IT departments across the board were unsure of the new devices role in their larger technology strategy. The source of uncertainty: how does a disparate group of mobile computing hardware and operating systems integrate and interact with preexisting application services? As with any new technology or medium, we are faced with the possibility of a new way to go about doing things. 20th century communication theorist Marshall McLuhan reminds us:

The personal and social consequences of any medium- that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology… This fact merely underlines the point that “the medium is the message” because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action.

The mobile medium is here. Mobile device adoption has exploded, which has given rise to a change in many workspaces and commercial IT environments, many of which now actively encourage employees and consumers to bring their own device (BYOD) to serve as an interface to internal application resources. This is in stark contrast to the more traditionalist corporate IT policies of past i.e. application data is only to be accessed on sanctioned company machines. This about-face transition in IT policy has, in a large part, been the result of simply recognizing where mobile devices fit into the larger technology and communications fabric: they are extensions for accessing the rich stores of pre-existing application data. Think: mobilized data access. It is more of a pull than a push based relationship. Many industries are already beginning to push forward with this transition to mobile data access, as InfoWorld reports:

Two of the most highly regulated industries — financial services and health care (including life sciences) — are most likely to support BYOD. So are professional services and consulting, which are “well” regulated… These businesses are very much based on using information, both as the service itself and to facilitate the delivery of their products and services. Mobile devices make it easier to work with information during more hours and at more locations. That means employees are more productive, which helps the company’s bottom line.

The core observation is that companies have already created value by architecting an application service that synthesizes data in meaningful way; the strategy for going mobile is a matter of extending this data into the new mobile mediums in an efficient and still-meaningful manner. The writing is on the wall and the waters are moving, mobile devices are weaving their way into the fabric of enterprise IT environments. Industry technology leaders, such as GE, are leading the way:

Enterprise mobile applications are here, but there is another important co-dependent observation associated with this realization that has do with how devices go about accessing pre-existing application data. There is the common denominator shared between 95% today’s smart devices: open web access with WebKit standards. By taking advantage of this, many of today’s enterprise level mobile applications are delivering their content via the web – simultaneously reaching all devices and platforms with the same set of data. In layman’s terms, this means these applications are using traditional web languages (html, css, javascript) to send and render application data to the user’s mobile device.

This mobile web delivery approach is in contrast to the initial approach many IT departments adopted, which was to develop application extensions for native deployment to all the major devices. The problem with this strategy was that the list of devices keeps expanding, and managing the delivery and updating of multiple codebases for independent native delivery to each device platform is no small task. This approach is expensive, with bottom-line resource considerations immediately coming into question as the dollars quickly flow outward to support this delivery strategy.

The good news is it’s never been easier to extend the reach of an enterprise application service via a mobile web delivery approach. Today, powerful web app frameworks, like Sencha Touch, provide the backbone for mobile web experiences that look and feel like native apps. To get a feel for how Sencha Touch functions, take a look at the framework introduction video which is a walkthrough of their demonstration Kitchen Sink app:

With the ability to seamlessly request preexisting data sets and deliver this data with specific user interfaces optimized for the user’s given device, enterprise-ready mobile web apps are primed to explode. We’re excited to be a service provider in this rapidly evolving space and will continue to share our insights with you as the scenery continues to evolve.