Feel that vibration in your pocket? It’s probably a notification from an app, or an email generated by an app, or maybe it’s your spouse, who needs help figuring out some app they just got. It’s an app world out there, and with millions of them flying through the interwebs at fiber optic speeds, don’t you ever wonder where they’re all coming from, and where they’re all going?
Enterprises are feeling that vibration too. They’re churning out new apps as fast as they can, and they’re doing it for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s because they want to be first to market in their industry with a mobile offering – like Liberty Mutual Group Benefits. More often than not, there are just too many slow, manual processes in these titanic operations. Sometimes, a new regulation pops up out of nowhere with the ultimatum of “report now or pay later.” My life science friends know what I’m talking about! And then there are the most interesting cases, when companies innovate, create new revenue opportunities or huge cost savings.
Most of the time, these apps get their wings because they’re motivated by differentiation. They’re not the abbreviation soup of an enterprise – CRM, ERP, HRM, FMS, CRO, EPS, BI etc. You and all your competitors adopted those in parallel, and while they do keep you up and running, they don’t make you different, and they don’t allow you change as quickly as your business changes.
Here’s what I mean; according to Gartner Research, there are three ‘pace layers’ of apps in an enterprise. You have your behemoth abbreviation soup apps; Capgemini CTO Ron Tolido calls these the Trains of an organization, (as opposed to your scooter apps that get you that last mile to your destination). You also have your differentiating apps – the ones that support a proprietary process, house fancy algorithms and functions, fulfill some specific business need, improve your customer’s experience, and generally set you apart from competitors. The fastest growing companies have TONS of these. And then you have your innovating apps – the industry firsts, the money makers, the brand pushers, the disruptors and more often than not the company visionary’s love-child. The industry leading companies around the world rely on these to stay ahead.
So where are they coming from, and how are enterprise application development teams rising to the task of creating more apps than ever, that are more complex than ever, with better user interfaces – than ever? …a new legion of Business Engineers! They’re the Knights Templar of the modern enterprise, composed of one part business, one part techie, and one part application platform as-a-service, and poured over a secure cloud infrastructure until optimal scalability is reached.
These applications and their creators are taking on powerful positions in their organizations, for the first time becoming the materializers of differentiation and innovation generated by their commercial counterparts. Behind every great app, is a great team and behind every great team, is a great technology. What’s the special sauce that makes these stars align? It’s a technology that supports business engineers in the [speedy] creation of great applications. If these gears aren’t working together throughout development, you end up with apps that don’t serve their needs, blasted budgets, stretched scopes, and nauseating opportunity costs.
We call these team members business engineers because they have the technical know-how to think of how things should work underneath the hood, but they have the business and process experience to know how to make an app rise up to its real-life use case. These are the folks in your organization who will usher in a new world of enterprise apps, and they’re using application platforms to do it: Without the speed and maintenance benefits of model driven development, distributed team-friendly and social-collaboration infused Agile project management, and predefined one-click-deployment environments, these individuals are construction managers without cranes. That’s how a legion of business engineers are powering the enterprise app world. Go ahead, you can check your phone now.