Business Application Strategy: Considerations, Benefits & Key Elements

• Must Haves to Consider in Your Enterprise Application Strategy
• Benefits of Enterprise Application Strategy
• Key Elements of Enterprise Application Strategy

Before you jump the bandwagon it is important that you do a check of how your enterprise application portfolio is aligned with people and processes along with technology.

Here’s a rundown on steps that require consideration;

Step 1: Build an application inventory
Step 2: Assess compliance consideration for applications
Step 3: Determine the need for the type of application services
Step 4: Define application categories
Step 5: Application deployment and management parameters
Step 6: Role and responsibility mapping

It offers enterprise with below-listed benefits;

• Adapt quickly to constantly changing user requirements
• Enhance the functionality of existing applications
• Re-platform applications from on-premise to cloud for scalability and high performance
• Automate repetitive and mundane tasks to streamline processes
• Drive informed decisions in real-time with next-gen technology & tools
• Reduce overall operational and administrative costs

Enterprise software solutions of today have shifted not only how businesses grow, but also how they can control their operational and strategic initiatives. And to deliver a faster pace of innovation in 2022 and beyond, listed below are the enablers that your organization can consider. We’ve tried to answer how and why it’s useful to incorporate them into your strategic initiatives.

Chatbots

More and more companies are leveraging chatbots into their business processes to address customers’ needs 24/7. They are revolutionizing the ways businesses connect with consumers.  Here are a few essentials you can consider before bot application development strategy;

• Defining the right “need”
• Right KPI mapping aligned to the goal/objective for chatbot
• Platform consideration
  • Environment/ecosystem based on your organization’s tech maturity
  • How they would interact with TA – would it use NLP, natural language generation software, or just a simple scripted text
• Deeper assessment & understanding of the role of AI & ML – specifics of what they can/can’t do for the business requirement
• Setup evaluation – how it would work with your existing system
• Offered benefits
• Risk anticipation
• Right amount of testing – Different channels might have different flavors, different experiences
• If considering integration – you must evaluate the bot’s architecture, and decide on the permissions you’re willing to give the bot

Here’s a recent article on chatbot development that would cover the essentials of best practices of developing a bot and how we can help.

Cloud

Cloud adoption is a top investment priority for most modern enterprises today. Driven by the need for diverse flexibility, scalability & accessibility, cloud services enable on-demand scaling of the capacity and even billed as a flexible pay-as-you-go model. An organization optimally leveraging cloud services can build or re-build app architectures appropriately.

And while doing that they can expect the following benefits;

• Minimize or even eliminate the dependency on resources to support and maintain in-house hardware & infrastructure
• Significantly reduce software development efforts
• Experience time reduction to develop, test, and deploy apps
• Time and cost reduction with a software upgrade
• Easy allocation/deallocation of cloud resources for specific services or processes based on the project demand.
• Smart automation of almost all IT operations processes, thus allowing IT teams to focus on supporting strategic business initiatives.

Read how you can evaluate existing infrastructure costs as a CTO/CIO and plan to maximize application availability for the users.

Low Code Process Automation

This development approach is making strides today – thanks to the little to no coding experience dependency.  It is driven by unprecedented pressures on enterprise IT departments to create custom software(s) that comply with organizational standards. And, further, empower the business users to become “citizen developers” or “makers” within a CI/CD process.

While there are many benefits to a low-code app dev approach, however, by simply adopting a platform like Power Platform will not guarantee success. You would require a tech partner who can formulate an enterprise-level low-code app dev strategy. It would address essential questions like – how can your development team evolve to better align business and IT, what is preparedness to scale up from one app to 10, 20 or more.

The essential steps would include;

• Identification of key business SMEs (citizen developers).
• Leverage maximum impact by iterating apps in short intervals.
• Gain IT support and provide visibility for integration and policy management.
• Map governance processes for different kinds of apps around access with sensitive data, performance, security policy, and integrations.
• Selection of platform that scales up with digital transformation roadmap by considering use cases, skill sets & ecosystem requirements.

You can read this blog to know how to accelerate your digital transformation journey with Microsoft’s low-code development platform along with some interesting low-code use cases.

Blockchain

The said technology typically works by creating a shared record for an interaction that is neither managed nor stored by parties. The prominent application includes; money transfer & payment processing, fraud prevention system, advertising insights, supply chain monitoring and others. In the cryptocurrency world, powerful, energy-guzzling servers globally compete to solve cryptographic equations that verify transaction integrity between buyers and sellers, with a token awarded to the victors.

It works much better from an enterprise strategy implementation standpoint when leaders work together on blockchain — specifically on governance, meaning supervision of the distributed ledger technology throughout its various development phases. As part of this process, it is vital to reach a consensus on the types of issues — such as systems integration and scalability that are adoption critical. Digital transformation using next-gen technology like blockchain is the future everyone is headed for. Take stock and join the future.

These latest trends in digital transformation will continue to reshape global business systems. Choose one or more wisely as per your business needs and reap the rewards of staying on top of your competition in this digital age.