Rapid App Development Buyer's Guide
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To Selecting a Rapid Buyer's Application Development Guide Platform ES Executive Summary I Democratizing App Development with RAD 7 Capabilities to Test When Evaluating RAD II Platforms. Evaluating RAD Platforms – One Develo- III per’s Journey RAD Platform Licensing Models and How IV They Affect TCO Democratizing App Development with RAD Mobile-savvy end-uses -- used to cutting edge B2C apps -- demand targeted, mobile-first apps with outstanding user experiences. The backlog of new apps or existing apps needing updates is skyrocketing, and IT is strapped to meet demand. Mobile developers are hard to find and hire, and the talent doesn’t currently live in your organization. Or does it? Here’s one look at how companies are succeeding amid the mobile app explosion by empowering line of business users to build web and mobile apps with Rapid App Development (RAD) Platforms. ABOUT Exploding Demand for Business Apps But No One to Build Them Despite all the talk about mobile, significant roadblocks still exist for companies looking to mobilize their business processes. Despite their bullish technology reports, Gartner, Forrester and IDC have all released survey data that shows how companies are facing a massive bottleneck: they have hundreds of apps to build, yet have only gotten a few out the door. Gartner predicts 20 million apps will be built by 2018, yet also insists that development is currently unable to manage that workload. That same report sees the backlog only getting worse, indicating that “the market demand for mobile app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organization capacity to deliver them.” In fact, a related Gartner statistic stated that most organizations have developed and released fewer than 10 apps, with a significant number of respondents not having released any mobile apps at all. “This is an indication of the nascent state of mobility in most organizations, with many organizations questioning how to start app development in terms of tools, vendors, architectures or platforms, let alone being able to scale up to releasing 100 apps or more,” wrote Gartner Research Director Adrian Leow in a June Gartner press release about the data. A recent Forrester report explains that releasing new apps only compounds the problem. Once an app is released, businesses quickly discover that the new app cements users’ expectations that the app will be improved, and fuels their hunger for new and better apps. This adds further pressure on already-tapped development teams. Why is it so hard to get these apps built? It’s a classic supply and demand issue: enterprises are facing a severe skills shortage in terms of building enterprise mobile apps. Native app developers -- who can build mobile apps that integrate with corporate data, work on all devices and have the latest security capabilities -- are expensive and in short supply. And once one app is released, end users are clamoring for additional functionality or a second app that augments the first. The demand for business apps is outstripping the supply of experienced native app developers who can build them. An Interesting Analogy: Big Data and the Rise of Business Analysts To understand if democratization of app development is hype or the real thing, let’s look at an example from the Business Intelligence market. Early in its hype cycle, analytics was handled by highly-skilled statisticians in a particular domain area by IT employees who ran queries against corporate databases at the request of business groups. The big data era was just beginning, and more and more data was arriving in the hands of business users at a faster and faster rate. As these employees become hungry to benefit from data-driven decision-making, they quickly outgrew these traditional methods. Marketing and sales managers couldn’t wait weeks for IT to analyze last month’s sales and marketing figures, and pharma research directors watched expenses grow as they waited for statisticians to analyze the latest clinical trial data to see if a drug trial should be killed. These business users wanted a way to analyze the data and make data-driven decisions daily. While statisticians were highly valued, they were hard to find and expensive to hire. Also, the statistical software they used was cost-prohibitive and required extensive training. Alternately, IT could run data queries cost-effectively, but the backlog of BI report requests or database queries was frustrating the business units and paralyzing IT from doing value-added work. And once the query was done, the business user likely had a follow-up question to ask: “Ok – sales were down, but in what regions and due to what factors?” Amid their frustration, business users started taking matters into their own hands. They began pulling website traffic, sales figures or customer service data out of the corporate database and into Excel to try to run their own reports and answer their own questions. While in the short-term this provided some critical answers, it caused another set of problems. IT had no control over corporate data. These reports and information lived outside corporate systems and findings were hard to act on or track. The workflow around these analyses was out of daily business processes and largely unseen. Data parameters were set in Excel spreadsheets instead of in corporate systems. And the list goes on... Soon data visualization and analytics vendors arrived on the scene. These solutions offered the best of both worlds: guided analyses were available so that business users could visualize their own data quickly. SaaS-savvy business users could login, find their data sources and start building visualizations or analytics applications that identified insights and outliers in their data. At the same time, IT was in control of the data integration and security. And all these analysis efforts were captured as workflows so employees could share practices and track future findings to power better, faster analyses. This gave rise to one of the most demanded hires in business today: business analysts. What About Mobile App Development? The current situation with business app demand in organizations is similar to the situation organizations faced with the onslaught of analytic app demands at the start of the big data boom. There are too many apps that need to be built and too few skilled developers to build them. Plus, as soon as one app is built, users ask for additional functionality or a mobile operating system update is required – virtually the same – virtually the same situation IT faced when it sent out a BI report and immediately received a request with an additional query to run. If Gartner’s prediction that organizations will need to build approximately 1,000 apps is correct, companies face a serious problem.6 We already know that organizations cannot afford to outsource hundreds of routine business apps to mobile development firms. Outsourcing an app can cost upwards of $100,000. Multiply that by 150 and it’s a nonstarter for most organizations. And a talented iOS or Android developer can only build and update so many apps at a time. And what if the CEO works on a Surface tablet? More importantly, the true measure of success isn’t simply making more apps, but rather making high-quality, strategic apps that stand to directly impact business performance in some way. CIOs who only measure enterprise mobility based on the number of app deployed are missing the true power of enterprise mobility. And who in the business is better qualitied to optimize business processes than the line of business users who use them every day? Solving the Problem: Marrying Citizen Developers and Rapid App Development Technology So how are IT organizations going to get hundreds of B2B and B2E apps built get these built while they do their regular day job around systems and security? They’re not. There’s only one way companies will get hundreds – or even thousands -- of B2B and B2E apps built by 2017 or 2018 and have them continually improved and updated. They must democratize the building of web and mobile apps. How? By enabling hundreds of web developers, working in IT or other parts of the organization, and line of business employees already within their organizations to build business apps . The First Half of the Equation: Empowering Citizen Developers Gartner calls line of business developers “citizen developers” and defines them as: A user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.” 7 In fact, speak to many business users and they already consider themselves app builders already. Gartner predicts: By 2020, at least 70% of large enterprises will have established “ successful citizen development policies, up from 20% in 2010.” 8 Line of business developers, or citizen developers, already live in your organization. They can be business analysts already familiar with SaaS solutions and how to put data and workflow together. They can be web developers or employees with some basic JavaScript or HTML5 experience. But success depends on providing proper training, guidance and ongoing assistance to citizen developers. Putting LOB users in the developer’s chair -- are we sure this will work? Of course -- history is a wise teacher. Business analysts rose from within the line of business ranks to build thousands of analytics applications that drive data-driven business decisions and processes today. Smart people within organizations won’t wait for IT to catch up – they’re going to go out and find ways to get the business objectives met.All IT needs to do is find a way to harness their expertise and hunger for solutions and give them the right technology to succeed.