Five Rules of Modern Application Development

The convergence of mobile, social, cloud and Big Data technologies (what research firm Gartner, Inc. calls the “nexus of forces”) is changing how work gets done, and how IT supports the business. Work can now happen anywhere, at any time, across a multitude of devices.

Turning these new technologies into real business value requires an understanding of what differentiates truly “modern” business software. There are five qualities, identified by Michael Beckley, CTO of Appian, that enterprise software applications must exhibit in order to accelerate better decisions and actions in modern work environments.

Click through for five rules of modern app development, as identified by Michael Beckley, CTO of Appian.

Desktop = Mobile

In today’s fast-paced business world, mobile and the desktop must offer the same capabilities and user experience. Mobile is not an “add-on” capability anymore. Now, any application lacking native mobility on par with the desktop experience is a legacy application the day it is rolled out.

On-Premise = Cloud

IT teams need to focus on accelerating the time-to-business-value for new applications and services, but they shouldn’t give up ownership and control of their applications and data.

Modern applications must offer full parity across public cloud, private cloud, on-premise and hybrid deployments. They must also allow easy portability of complete applications and data sets between environments.

Value = Participation

With modern applications, enhanced internal communication creates added business value. By using the social collaboration tools of a modern work platform, employees are able to easily participate in business-critical dialogue, both structured and unstructured. This becomes even more valuable when workers can easily collaborate via mobile devices.

Awareness – Knowledge – Action

Increased collaboration and participation drives greater organizational awareness. A modern application must further provide visibility into all relevant data (regardless of where it resides) and collaborations to
turn that awareness into useful knowledge. There are many social platforms attempting this today. Where they fall short, however, is in the final step – enabling business action on that new knowledge directly from the same application interface.

Future proof

The pace of change is too great. More than ever, organizations need to work with technology partners who can take on the burden of harnessing disruptive technologies.

By pushing the innovation burden to vendors, business and IT leaders can focus on leveraging those innovations to grow the business, engage customers, increase operational efficiency and reduce risk.