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I spent the day learning a great deal about Microstrategy’s mobile business intelligence suite for iOS. My interest in mobile BI intersects with MyST’s Net Intelligence service used by companies such as Vail Resorts and Citrix (see Net Intelligence: A New Slice of Business Intelligence Destined for iPad).

Today’s time away from the office, immersed in the depths of information rendering solutions, gave me some time to reflect on app strategies and the challenges businesses face building and deploying apps. For the most part, business teams charged with the responsibility of building mobile apps typically weigh requirements in the context of either native or web app strategies. Some consider hybrid apps (a combination of native with integrated web functionality). Even my own eBook on this subject doesn’t adequately factor in an emerging alternative made possible by mature apps.

Apps, The Atomization of Work

Business app requirements are also directly influenced by user assumptions evolving from the tag line made famous by Apple – “There’s an app for that”. Smart phone and tablet users have an expectation that each app roughly equates to a process or a unit of work. If this perception is sustained into the future, and there’s no indication it wont, businesses must atomized work processes to meet these expectations.

The stage is set for a massive influx of business apps. The typical small to medium sized business might have 200 or more different apps in its stable of resources that employees will choose from to get work done. I won’t be surprised to see upwards of a thousand different apps available to meet the requirements of a Fortune 500 company. My fear is these estimates are far too conservative.

Something’s Gotta Give

With hundreds of app requirements on the horizon, how will businesses cope with a shortage of experienced XCode developers, significant friction to moving apps into the App Store, and the effort required to develop high performance web apps?

Runtime app frameworks are the answer.

A runtime app is a native app that interprets instructions provided in the form of scripts, configuration attributes, or other data elements. The app acts as a solution framework that can provide specific application features.

Microstrategy‘s app is a runtime framework design mostly for business intelligence solutions. Although, there are many types of reporting solutions that can be created to leverage this app – it’s not limited to tabular data and it possess the agility to create complex workflows that make it easier to discover insight into operational data.

FileMaker Go (Apple’s mobile database solution for Filemaker) is also a runtime framework. Filemaker Go makes it possible to run very custom complex apps utilizing organizational data and content. The apps are built using Filemaker Pro on the desktop and the resulting runtime app definition is executed on iOS devices within the native app framework known as Filemaker Go.

Runtime frameworks will become very popular as the underlying foundation of many mobile business apps. The adoption of this approach will be rapid because there are so few alternatives available for businesses to quickly become mobile-enabled in cost-effective ways.

And best of all, the only code required is whatever the runtime framework requires. Microstrategy is designed to completely avoid code – apps are assembled like Legos(TM) in a model. filmmaker apps are similar, although, scripts are necessary for more complex apps.

It’s quite possible that the future of mobile apps for internal business use will be developed mostly from business logic components that allow companies to rapidly design, deploy, and change how mobile work is done.

- Just Sayin’ …