How to speed up enterprise application development in three easy steps

With the app market remaining one of the fastest growing markets in the world, apps have become an integral part of life. The business-to-business (B2B) environment has expanded its capabilities by developing enterprise applications to improve their efficiency. There are literally hundreds of apps that increase productivity and functionality such as voice transcription, 3D scanners, file storage and sharing, communication, augmented reality and the list can go on. There is literally an app for everything and the ideas to build new ones are limitless.

According to Technopedia, “An enterprise application (EA) is a large software system platform designed to operate in a corporate environment such as business or government. EAs are complex, scalable, component-based, distributed and mission critical.” Apps have been able to reduce lead times, improve user experience, connect services and products and improve business efficiency.

Proving to be cost effective, resourceful and intelligent solutions, businesses love apps so much that “companies today use on average of 16 cloud apps at work,” according to a recent report published by cloud security company, Okta. A few of the most popular applications used in corporate environments are CRM, CMS, ERP, business intelligence, email, analytics and billing systems which benefit organisations by accelerating growth and adopt a successful digital transformation.

With technology advancing faster than ever and people becoming savvier when using new digital tools, businesses must stay on top of competition and anticipate potential customer needs and deliver according to their customer’s expectations. We feel that businesses need to focus on three easy steps when they start their enterprise application development process, and these are:

1. Clearly define your app expectations

Before starting any project, companies need to decide on the main objectives and the KPIs they want to achieve and track. It is crucial to know where your main problems lie so you can improve these areas. The expectations must be realistic, although studies show that, recently companies expect apps to be created faster without increasing the developing time.

A study 2015 Sencha conducted with Forrester Consulting called ‘The Rise of Web Technology’ confirms: “In talking to our customers all over the world, we've seen some consistent trends around the strategic importance of web technology and a shift away from native development as organisations try to improve developer productivity and deliver increasingly complex applications to their users - faster.”

A tip here is to focus on information technology and architecture concepts of building data and use an efficient rapid application platform for successful outcomes. Think of what the end users want your system to deliver, how to improve inner communication, how to make certain systems collaborate and how integrating data correctly can help your organisation achieve rapid growth.

2. Adopt new technologies

One of the key issues encountered when businesses want to replace old systems or improve current ones is the adoption of new technologies. Many people feel scared when they need to learn new software and are faced with unfamiliar ways of doing things, but exploration is part of the success journey. As Bill Gates affirms: “Information technology and business are becoming inextricably interwoven. I don’t think anybody can talk meaningfully about one without the talking about the other.”

Before implementing the new tools in their processes, organisations should think about the value that the tool is bringing and the benefits that will increase productivity, transparency, effectiveness and structure. Functionality is critical and learning to use new tools should be user-friendly and empowering.

3. Use a low code application development platform

Citizen development is a concept that has expanded in the past few years with the growth of application development. The concept’s origins lie when different problems appeared between business leaders and IT departments. In the first instance, whenever business people wanted to change any processes through bespoke applications, they used to go directly to the IT specialists within their organisation looking for support and guidance.

But this is not the case now. There are widely available and easy to use rapid application development platforms that anyone can use and get successful results. As defined by Gartner: “A citizen developer is a user who creates new business applications for consumption by others using development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT.”

It means that anyone within an organisation, whether it’s the HR manager, marketing executive, salespeople or business analysts, can develop their own apps by using IT certified development software. For instance, KnowledgeKube is the fastest way to develop highly connected enterprise applications for the Web, Windows, iOS and Android. You can create fully-featured applications for customers and employees alike, whilst seamlessly providing the ability to handle huge amounts of data behind the scenes. Discover what can be achieved in a day with KnowledgeKube.

One of the best things about KnowledgeKube is that it can connect to over 60 service providers, applications and file formats. For us, the intention has always been to make data access as simple as possible, lowering the bar of entry for consuming and using data in applications. There’s a long list of services and applications that KnowledgeKube can connect to, including Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Azure and more.

We believe that true digital transformation isn't just about digitising a process like-for-like. KnowledgeKube allows you to optimise your processes, digitise existing manual tasks, and join processes together to see huge reductions not only in duplication of effort, but also in costs. Anyone with little or no coding experience can become a citizen developer and create successful enterprise apps using KnowledgeKube.