Applications Unleashed
At the heart of any Technology Business is its applications portfolio. A thriving heartbeat of the organization – part of the business, responsive to every demand.
These applications mirror the new business dynamics, built, and continuously changed at high speed, to a high quality, and in whatever incarnation necessary. Yet, changes are afoot, dear Watson. Many applications no longer look like the ones we used to know, as they morph into a composable mesh of microservices.
And where is that old-fashioned user interface again? With agility and minimum viable products no longer the “new normal”, but the “well and truly established”, the quality of application services needs to be at an enterprise level – with the trust balance of the organization secured by design, and a continuous, flawless deployment throughout all business operations.
The applications portfolio of a Technology Business is lightweight, free of corporate boundaries, easy to connect to, and built on cloud-native and microservice-based capabilities – all the while adapting to ever-changing needs. But achieving such a composable portfolio is far from easy, and several aspects need to be considered.
Simplifying, rationalizing, choosing the right solutions, and ultimately decommissioning inflexible, aging applications is a daunting task that no IT expert learns in school. Yet, it is key to leveling the playing field for the next generation of application services, and as the latest Digital Mastery research shows, 64% of organizations are well on their way to migrating their legacy applications to cloud-based replacements.
When new applications are built, they must be done in an agile, continuously deliverable way – where business and IT people are in integrated teams, perfectly in sync with the actual operations. Exactly what we’d expect from a Technology Business. And, to add even more decisiveness and transparency to the mix, adopting open-source principles within the organization can be a phenomenal culture-building tool, too.
Having said that, why build at all if you don’t have to? Building custom applications is a challenging, complex, and unsustainable undertaking – and the scarcity of skilled experts doesn’t help. Low code/no code tools provide high productivity and enable more people to develop the apps, increasingly on the business side of the wonder wall. ‘Fusion programming’ combines the best of both worlds. Reuse of existing apps and services is preferable to custom-built, especially in the cloud: it saves time, money, resources, and – yes – even energy.
Furthermore, look to upcycle and augment applications by adding touches of ‘smart’ through increasingly powerful AI services to significantly prolong the life of application services, eradicating the need to rebuild or replace them.
Still, have more ambitions? Make your apps ‘green’, engineering them for less use of energy and resources. The beauty is in simple, efficient applications services that can be easily composed to address a Technology Business challenge.
Your applications are eagerly waiting to be uncaged. Unleash them!
Thilo Hermann
Expert in Residence