By Quinton Wall, Director of Technical Platform Marketing, salesforce.com
@quintonwall
Marc Andreessen recently stated that software is eating the world. He proposed that every industry can, and is, being revolutionised by software. Andreessen’s statement got me thinking of the old adage – you are what you eat.
What if organisations took a look at their software diet? Would it be a healthy diet capable of transforming the industry they work in, or something less desirable that may lead you organisational health problems later?
Ask yourself, what does software and app development diet in your business look like?
The fast food app development diet
The fast food app development diet often exists in businesses on the go. They don’t have time to stop and wait for IT to get through their backlog, spin up servers, or wait months just to deliver a prototype of a new app. They need it all now. This need is just like fast food.
We all know fast food is bad for us, but when IT is too busy keeping the lights on, users often resort to the fast food app development diet. They create spreadsheets, local databases, and use anything else that is convenient, quick, and accessible. It might satisfy the immediate need, but you know it’s going to catch up with you. What happens when that laptop that contains the spreadsheet of your entire company’s financial results suffers a hard drive failure, or is stolen?
The locavore app development diet
Back in the day, a community’s diet was dictated by food grown, harvested, and sold within a hundred mile radius. Research suggests that this locavore diet helps build immunity to local virus strains. The same is true for the businesses that develop all of their own software and apps – they fit your business; You wrote them specifically for you.
However, there is a problem – it’s the locavore’s dilemma for app development.
Businesses that only develop apps in house are at risk of missing variety, and the benefits of a being part of a broader ecosystem of app development trends. Could apps be developed in new languages that in-house developers may not be familiar with? Could open source and cloud technologies enable IT to better focus on solving business problems faster? Variety in one’s app development diet is critical to organisational growth. Without it, your organisation will not innovate.
The supermarket app development diet
The local supermarket has fundamentally changed the way we live. The shelves are full of choice – fresh food, packaged products, processed ingredients, and more. The pure convenience of walking the grocery isle and getting something off the shelf cannot be overlooked.
Many organisations do the exact same thing with off the shelf products. Unfortunately, just like your local grocery store, packaging can be misleading. If a business does don’t look closely at the ingredients contained in their ‘processed’ apps, they may be in for a shock. We’ve all heard the horror stories of failed multi-million dollar upgrades, yearlong customisation projects, and inability to integrate packaged apps. These nightmares are all the result of a poor Supermarket App Development diet.
The software is eating the world app development diet
Prepare yourself – I’m going to give you the answer for a healthy app development diet, and you don’t even need to sit through an infomercial, or buy a set of steak knives.
Are you ready? Here goes.
Not surprisingly, the answer is exactly the same as any diet – balance. I’m sorry to disappoint you if you were looking for a magic pill, or the equivalent of seven-minute abs, but the good news is that a balanced app development diet is easy to achieve. It’s not realistic to expect that we are all starting at the same point in our organisation’s app development diet. However, every organisation can introduce healthy software habits by following these three steps:
1. Admit your bad habits (we all have them!)
Look closely at your existing processes and see where users are binging on fast food. Offer them alternatives such as cloud computing and Platform as a Service to enable users to build their own apps, but do it in a scalable, governable, and trusted way.
2. Re-enforce the positive habits
Encourage what your organisation is doing right. Leverage existing in-house apps and developer skills by providing modern tooling where they can build apps using the right language for the job, build using open source libraries and technology, and crush the IT backlog by using cloud computing to stop spending time on infrastructure, and focus on innovation.
3. Read the labels
Make sure that when you do shop for off-the-shelf products in your software supermarket, you check the ingredients. Put together a healthy app checklist to ensure that any product includes the fundamentals: modern, open APIs, mobile-first designs, support for social networks, centralised identity, and scalability that doesn’t require heavy investment in infrastructure.
Why not give the ‘Software Is Eating The World’ app diet a go? Isn’t it time your organisation coded healthy?
