The financial services industry — typically risk-averse when itcomes to adopting new technologies — has embraced mobiletechnology.

In my experience, the initial mobility related efforts atfinancial institutions, especially at credit unions, have beenfocused on creating customer/member facing apps. Beyond that,there has been a lack of focus and consistency in the mobilerelated efforts. This has resulted in what I consider to bethe “WildWest of App Development.”

This “Wild West” phenomenon is fueled by some interestingdynamics related to the mobile space:

• Lack of a coordinated app roadmap across theenterprise. Companies have spent significant timeand energy on improving their IT readiness to support mobile needs.However, in most cases they are lacking a clear, coordinatedroadmap of apps that will support the business drivers of theorganization. In the absence of such a roadmap, every idea that canget funded is being developed as an app. This lack of a holisticenterprise view also results in efforts that end up buildingoverlapping solutions as well as poorly conceived pointsolutions.
• Building apps is the most visible part of a mobilestrategy. If you want to show progress related toyour mobile adoption, building apps tends to be the most visibleaspect. Before you know it, you have numerous apps popping upwithin the enterprise.
• Your creative agency is driving your mobilestrategy. Without the experience of creating mobilestrategies, agencies are falling back on their experience as onlinedesigners and trying to offer app development solutions. The endresult: there is an app for everything. Unfortunately theenterprise pays for it and many of them would never have been builtif the time to optimize the portfolio was put in place and thebusiness had looked past the hype.

With these dynamics at play, many credit unions are alreadydealing with the “Wild West” scenario. For these companies, I offerthe following key considerations:

1. Create a Demand Prioritization Process.

Business stakeholders are coming up with ideas and asking thatthey to be turned into mobile apps. While some of these ideas aresurely great, there is a fair bit of “we have a mobile hammer soeverything feels like an app” type of thinking going on.

Organizations need to create a process to take these ideas andvery quickly prioritize the value, innovation, readiness, and thecomplexity of implementation before an idea can be considered forapp development. The goal is not to stifle innovation byintroducing a “toll gate” process but rather to infuse somediscipline into the ideation process.

2. Create an App Roadmap for YourOrganization.

Identify the various stakeholders in the organization that couldbe possible users of mobile apps. For each of these groups gothrough a process of identifying mobile app scenarios. Organizethese ideas using an ideation framework that can help identifypossible apps. Then, prioritize these app ideas by ranking them forbusiness value, readiness of the organization and the ease ofimplementation.

Caution: Organizations have to be careful to not let this turninto a long, drawn-out strategy project. With mobile apps, speed iscritical and this prioritization process needs to be completedusing a methodology that gets to an actionable roadmap in rapidtimeframes.

3. Create a Mobile Competency Center to Avoid DisjointedApp Creation.

Whether you build a mobile-focused competency center usinginternal resources or a combination of your internal and externalpartners, it is clear that there needs to be a high level ofcoordination and consistency in the execution of your mobilestrategy. This includes the implementation of the apps on yourmobile roadmap using a common set of considerations for design,development and deployment.

Disjointed efforts can introduce additional variables and canresult in a suboptimal rollout of your mobile app related efforts.Centralizing the ownership, oversight, and implementation of themobile app roadmap is a critical consideration in avoiding thistype of disjointed app development effort.

Shahab Choudry is apartner at Propelics Inc.in San Jose, Calif.