A survey by IDG Communications of 160 IT Directors and Chief Information and Technology Officers at enterprise companies with more than 1,000 employees indicates 78 % of respondents plan to upgrade their organization’s enterprise applications to –
- provide people with better User experiences
- improve personnel productivity
- have more secure systems
- extend business capabilities in mobile
This recognizes that while enterprises have spent trillions of dollars on applications, there are challenges with workflows, complexity, interoperability, and intuitive User interfaces – which hasn’t meaningfully improved in decades. Because of this, the marginalization of existing applications and processes, and the need to improve at business innovation – is now impacting business outcomes. While this is an issue for desktop applications, it’s a much bigger issue with Mobile Apps – where quick, easy access to information, seamless systems, timely and personalized services are expected – to deliver a great User experience, increase organization relevance and revenue, as well as to support business innovation initiatives for a successful corporate transformation.
The survey also points out that these modernization efforts are being driven largely by the enterprise inability to move to cloud-based Apps for security and compliance reasons as well as the fact that legacy, on-premises applications are so deeply ingrained in daily business processes that they cannot be replaced. This is based on < 5% of the overall enterprise application portfolio will move to the cloud, while Apps that run on-premises are projected to drop only 3 % – in the next 12 months. Thus, it is no surprise that almost half of respondents say that their on-premises applications are here to stay and applications that touch critical data and systems must remain on-premises.
When looking at tools to modernize these enterprise applications, the priority is to be able to integrate with existing systems and leverage existing IT infrastructure, security practices, and tools. Respondents also cite how omnichannel support for enterprise applications is essential, so that people can access their applications on desktops, mobile devices, intranets, and messenger clients. Further, it was noted business people don’t really care where the Apps are hosted or what goes on behind the scenes, they just want them to work. Because of this and the importance of information services providing real value for the business, Enterprise Applications must deliver a great User experience, with relevant and timely information at the ” Desktop ” and in ” Mobile ” – to improve business outcomes.
Jan. 22, 2018 – CAIL – Mobile Industry Commentary