Enterprises are cognizant of the digital trends that are radically transforming customer behavior. It is causing enterprises to break a sweat in the way they operate, forcing them to adapt or perish. Developers and business users are not happy with the pace of innovation in their enterprises and find it hard to understand numerous processes and limitations that restrict them from moving faster.

Creating the ideal enterprise innovation infrastructure

Traditional application delivery can rarely get to all of the custom apps that the business needs causing enterprise IT teams to explore modern technology platforms. Meanwhile, CIOs are having sleepless nights thinking about how to tackle enterprise challenges while dealing with shrinking IT budgets.  The Sandbox for enterprise innovation provides the essential freedom from issues that confront today’s enterprise app development teams:

• With ease and speed of using rapid application delivery and low-code platforms
• Simpler integrations to APIs or master data on the company’s system of records and system of differentiation
• Having an application designed for cloud deployment and meeting scalability needs
• Using collaborative development involving not just professional developers
• The sandbox needs to make complex processes simple and have the ability to configure, manage and monitor systems out of the box.

What is a Pace Layered Application Strategy?

According to Gartner, a pace layered application strategy “is a methodology for categorizing, selecting, managing and governing applications to support business change, differentiation, and innovation.” With a pace layered strategy, businesses can build an application strategy that delivers faster response and a better ROI, without sacrificing integration, integrity, and/or governance. Gartner has classified these into three categories or layers explained in the figure below.

Systems of Innovation:
New applications are built on an ad hoc basis to cater to new business requirements and opportunities.

Systems of Differentiation:
Applications that need to incorporate company processes and industry-specific capabilities.  

Systems of Record:
These are legacy homegrown systems that support core transaction processing and manage the organization's critical master data. 

How to implement a Pace Layered strategy for your enterprise

WaveMaker has helped enterprises across industries and geographies to adopt Pace Layered strategy for their enterprise application portfolio using the following, proven three-phase execution process:

Assess:

• Create a panel of business users and IT application experts
• Analyze the characteristics of each application and the business process it supports
• Assign risk, cost, and business value to each application
• Categorize applications into one of the three pace-layers as per their characteristics
• The less frequent pace of change
• Fixed and stable process
• 10-20 year life span
• Investment as a capital asset
• Suited to Mode 1 of Bimodal IT

  The moderately frequent pace of change

• A fixed and dynamic process
• 3-5 year life span
• Investment as capital or expense
• Suited to Mode 1 or Mode 2 of Bimodal IT

Systems of Innovation

• The very frequent pace of change
• An ambiguous and dynamic process
• 6 months - 3-year life span
• Investment as an expense
• Suited to Mode 2 of Bimodal IT

Adapt:

• Adapt your application governance model to fit the objectives and needs of the three layers
• Use APIs to facilitate interoperability of the applications within and between layers
• Strive for business-IT alignment using 2-Pass Development approach
• Eliminate or shelve applications with high risk/cost and low business value

Advance:

• Build awareness of pace layers throughout the organization.
• Encourage users to think about applications and processes based on their probable rate of change.
• Modernize applications with the poor risk/cost but high business value
• Adopt low-code, Rapid Application Development platforms to help create an environment that fosters innovation

5 pitfalls to avoid when choosing a low-code platform

Today, enterprises are embarking on a journey venturing into new possibilities of application development to meet business demands. The adoption of low-code application development platforms seems to be very popular with most enterprises these days. However, while some have made the transition to low-code application development, there are enterprises out there who are unsure and hesitate in making this change to adapt to a low-code platform. This is understandable, as there are risks involved when it comes to choosing a low-code platform and a wrong choice can be costly.
We have put together five pitfalls that an enterprise can avoid while they choose a low-code app development platform.

1. Assuming all platforms support integrations to build full-stack applications
   Most platforms offer visual development capabilities. But, it is extremely important to look for features that ease the external integration of data and services. Look for out-of-the-box integrations and verify whether custom integrations can be built and reused across apps while choosing low-code platforms. In addition, choosing a platform that supports open source technologies allows an open and extensible approach to application delivery. This permits developers to create full-stack applications without worrying about vendor lock-in.
2. Assuming the feature set is standard across all platforms
   It is key for enterprises to make a detailed study of the features of a low-code platform to understand which ones would best suit their requirements. Out-of-the-box features provided by one low-code platform differ from the other platform. Few things to look out for are :
   • A modern low-code platform should provide ease of use to the user with features like visual development with simple drag and drop.
   • Collaborative development - where a developer can share their work with others and develop an application
   • Support of APIs which are the front and center of business applications and architecture.
   • Choose a platform that allows developers to create, publish and discover APIs with ease.
   • Apart from hosting and release management, look for solutions that allow for rapid and continuous provisioning, deployment, instant scalability, and maximum utilization of resources without hidden costs.
3. Assuming applications built are compatible with mobile devices
   Modern applications are required to work on multiple mobile devices, like phones and tablets. For such applications being built on a low-code platform, it does not mean re-building an application to suit the orientation of a phone or tablet. It means the No-code platform must offer cross-platform app development. Which in other words, is the ability to create applications using a single code base that can adapt to any native platform or operating system (which could be iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/RIM, etc) using a hybrid adaptive design enables applications to be run seamlessly on any device giving it cross-platform capabilities.
4. Assuming application migration is easy
   Modern low-code application development platforms offer multiple options of development like cloud and on-premise. Enterprises have frequently changing requirements of development either for their internal use or for their clients and have to adhere to either an on-premise or cloud-based setup. Now, the question arises can an application partly built over the cloud be migrated hassle-free to an on-premise setup of the same low-code platform provider. As development requirements change from cloud to on-premise, the low-code platform you choose should allow easy portability or migration of applications from one development setup to the other.
5. Maintenance, security, and support
   For an enterprise, terms like maintenance, security, and support are crucial when they take a decision to invest in a low-code app development platform.
   • Maintainability is a critical aspect of application delivery and is overlooked by many platforms. Verifying the generated code follows:  design patterns, is well-organized, uses standard naming conventions, and generates documentation that enables developers to understand and maintain.  
   • Enterprises crave the right security for their applications. While choosing a low-code application development platform, enterprises need to make sure they can handle flexible authentication and authorization mechanisms to secure users and various tasks within the application. It would be an added bonus if it can provide easy integrations of popular identity management systems like AD, LDAP, SSO, and OAuth.
   • Before investing in a modern low-code platform, enterprises need to make sure that the platform provides adequate support during the usage of the platform and meets all the SLAs promised by the platform to the enterprise.

Benjamin Franklin famously said, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". Keeping that in mind, the above pitfalls can be avoided and can help enterprises choose the right low-code platform for their application development needs.
WaveMaker’s RAD Platform is designed keeping in mind the requirements of a Software Developer, Citizen developer/business user, IT architect, and CIO.
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Why is it that 75% of the business and IT executives anticipate their software projects will fail? Why is failure rate often a planned expense that is written off long before development ever begins? Here's a fun infographic to not only understand the major friction points in delivering successful enterprise applications but also learn how to tackle these monsters and speed up custom app creation.

Do tell us about the monsters that scare you the most and any other ghouls we may have missed. Happy Halloween!

Even as you begin to read this, you are probably already in the midst of a disruption in the industry and are wondering how to equip your company to meet the new challenge.

5 big reasons why enterprises face challenges

1. Customers are more demanding - The digital world is constantly redefining customer taste, trends, and needs. Sometimes, these changes present opportunities that your company shouldn’t let go, to stay relevant.

2. Rate of business change is ever-increasing – Constant speeding of business change caused by the internet and mobile technologies is hugely determining who survives and who thrives.

3. Size doesn’t matter - Size is no protection in this digital world against market traction. The digital age has enabled everyone to innovate and cause disruption. New startups and lean competitors have no baggage of running the business on older models (or backward compatibility, in simple terms).

4. Lineage doesn’t matter - Customers are lapping up innovation and fresh ideas brought by younger and smaller players. Those with no lineage in an industry are chipping away the market share of large established players. Experience is no safety and reputation is transient.

5. Competitive threats are hard to see or act – Companies need to experiment and plan products and services that cannibalize their own successful (in the past) offerings. Innovate or perish paradigm is now a reality.

“40 percent of the top 500 companies (US) are no longer in the top 500, 10 years later” - Gordon Graylish, Intel global vice-president and general manager, Enterprise Solutions. Clearly, there is no reason for complacency.

Implications on IT

Whip the horse. Isn’t IT supposed to enable companies to steer through challenges? Do enterprise challenges translate into challenges for IT?

Application strategy is of high importance as every business strategy is powered by a software application behind - When Marc Andreessen said “Software is eating the world”, he meant it and it is not surprising that software is going to play a significant role in solving these enterprise challenges. Apps drive every strategy. Hence, app development (powering innovation in strategy) is of utmost importance to the enterprise.

Applications are needed faster than ever - Traditional development practices no longer meet the needs of new-age businesses. Enterprise IT taking business needs and translating them to software requirements for vendors (after an RFP process), is too slow to be acceptable. IT needs to find new ways of catering to this demand.

Do more with less, as budgets are limited and uncertain – Gartner estimates that 70 percent of IT funds go to things other than business innovation; most likely keeping the current systems running (keeping the lights on). Older software becomes a liability for numerous reasons and reduces the ability of an Enterprise to change. The problem of shrinking IT budgets is compounded by the gradual turning of software investments into legacy (a liability, not an asset). IT needs to generate more value out of prior investments and build on top.

Technology is changing too fast, limiting capacity build-up – Scorching pace of technology infusion is crunching the time enterprises have to build up their internal capability. New technology is rapidly multiplying possibilities for business leaders but is also questioning their status quo.

An incentive for saving time than money – Instead of striving to save its own expenditure, IT can serve better by equipping the company for its future battles in the shortest possible time. This forces IT to think of “Wrap and reuse” instead of “Rip and replace” strategies.
Innovation and reuse are at a premium.

What then?

This calls for a relook at what the enterprise IT spending and overall effort are focused on. Gartner has nicely captured how applications stack up (based on their pace of change), which also provides the proportion of focus and budget traditionally accorded by Enterprises.

However, considering the new set of challenges, a higher focus is needed on “Systems of Innovation” now than ever before. We should stop treating Technology or IT investment as Capex that needs predictable ROI. “Technology is a metaphor for Change. Technology is also a metaphor for Risk”, as Dr. Kenneth Green, Director of The Campus Computing Project, said at DiECon 2013.

In subsequent posts, I would attempt to further elaborate on this new kind of Enterprise Innovation Infrastructure and the options available for enterprises to implement in their organizations.

Check out other posts in the series. Twitter: #FutureAppStrategy

Jay Pullur

Today, enterprises are facing tremendous challenges in the product market that can only be addressed through business strategy innovation. Given that every new strategy needs to be powered by software product, the time has come to analyze how their software applications are built and explore if newer technologies or methodologies can make that better.

The intent of this series of postings is to talk about how software-powered enterprise innovation can be put to work. This thinking shapes the WaveMaker product and I would welcome views and suggestions from everyone connected with the topic.

Here is the rough outline for the series.

#1. IT Challenges for the Modern Enterprise

#2. Designing the sandbox for Enterprise Innovation

#3. Rapid Application Delivery (RAD) reality

#4. Can Private Cloud speed up application delivery?

#5. Designing for an unlimited supply of commodity hardware

#6. Integration Enable Everything

#7. Collaborating on API design

#8. API-First design. Can we parallelize development?

#9. Fixing the broken component sharing

#10. Designing the software component supply chain

Twitter:  #FutureAppStrategy

Jay Pullur