Three Important Strategies for Application Development
Consumer goods companies are facing significant challenges as they move into the digital future. Achieving incremental growth is difficult, cost productivity is hard to find and growth potential is at risk due to several factors - expansion in emerging markets is slowing; first-time consumers are proving difficult to reach in challenging markets; and competition is intensifying in developed markets.
Although technologies, competition and consumer expectations are evolving at hyper-speed, business applications are struggling to keep up. To seize the digital opportunity, consumer goods companies need to fundamentally rethink how applications should be built and deployed.
Three new strategies for application development are becoming increasingly important:
Modular architectures
Liquid applications require enterprises to create application architectures that are modular, featuring reusable components sourced internally or externally. One of the key components is emerging software platforms, including platforms as a service, which provide well-defined technical architectures along with standards, Three new strategies for application development governance and reusable code. Platforms facilitate more rapid creation and assembly of liquid business solutions, as applications are increasingly assembled from prebuilt components. With a platform approach, companies can engage consumers while also opening their platform to other innovators.
For example of the power of platforms comes from one global consumer goods and services company. The company is in the process of implementing a multichannel commerce solution based on SAP applications. The new single, streamlined, interactive platform will help the company offer a seamless, more personalized and complete customer experience and allow the company to benefit from agile, flexible, streamlined and consistent technology and processes to support local market needs.
Next-generation integration techniques
Liquid applications must be underpinned by a liquid architecture that has important, new characteristics. Investment in flexible, standardized, open integration services provides the ability to efficiently connect applications and information across the company.
Orchestration and business process management services allow applications to be configured and continuously tuned to meet the needs of the business. And APIs provide the glue to enable reusable components to be accessed from within a company as well as by external customers and business partners. In some cases, SaaS solutions provide the platforms that deliver liquidity in the application environment.
By automating routine tasks, intelligent applications offload complexity and supplement human effort through technologies such as auto-correction and robotics. Intelligent automation improves productivity by doing more work in a fraction of the time with more accuracy.
Intelligent applications offer three critical capabilities—intelligent automation, integrated analytics and self-governance. Integrated analytics create systems that can analyze and comprehend independently, embedding intelligence in the processes themselves and radically improving both business and IT performance.
Intelligent applications can be taught to act as digital agents and to learn and govern themselves autonomously—revolutionizing customer service, IT management and business innovation. As software intelligence grows in sophistication, most applications will learn to evolve and adapt, altering their behavior and extending their capabilities based on experience.
Connectivity in the age of the software- driven business is about more than application integration. It’s about creating new competitive frontiers using software. To grow revenue and defend their market position, businesses must open new dimensions of application connectivity—with business partner and customer ecosystems, as well as with the rapidly growing Internet of Things—that are essential to delivering new services.
Connected applications are required to dynamically interface with business partner and customer ecosystems in today’s highly networked, digital business environment. When properly designed and managed, an ecosystem multiplies the power of all the participants, leading to combinations of functionality—and revenue opportunities—that would previously have been difficult to achieve.
Enterprises need multiphase strategies to build and nurture an ecosystem. Start—and learn—with your internal developers and business functions, and then create a broader ecosystem that includes external entities such as business partners and customers.
TAKING THE LEAD
Today, the business of applications is changing how companies operate and grow. No longer a supporting capability, applications are a driver of strategy and competitive differentiation. They can enable entirely new services for new markets. The future of applications is an exciting one for companies that are willing to develop a new operating model for software development and then fundamentally change the way they build software.
Liquid applications will become increasingly essential to consumer goods companies as every consumer becomes a digital consumer in every market, and as personalized experiences—not just personalized products—need to be delivered across channels.
Monolithic applications that are slow to change will no longer be able to meet companies’ needs, especially in a volatile environment with new competitors and new business models.
A new generation of intelligent applications is also necessary as consumer goods companies move from a mind-set where business intelligence is a reporting factory for events in the past, to a mind-set and capability of turning predictive insights into action. With intelligent applications, analytics becomes embedded in the process. As the amount of data generated by a consumer goods company continues to proliferate and sources increase, it is vital to develop an intelligent architecture to monetize the asset.
Finally, connected applications will become increasingly essential because the need to grow at speed in new markets requires the ability to effectively leverage a partner ecosystem. Creating connected applications also necessitates the creation of entirely new methods for managing the Internet of Things.
Both IT and business leaders must understand what it means to be a software-driven business. They need to understand how software can spur growth, shape new markets and reach new customers. And, they must work together closely to orchestrate new business solutions.
Although technologies, competition and consumer expectations are evolving at hyper-speed, business applications are struggling to keep up. To seize the digital opportunity, consumer goods companies need to fundamentally rethink how applications should be built and deployed.
Three new strategies for application development are becoming increasingly important:
1. LIQUID APPLICATIONS
To compete with agility and speed, companies can no longer focus only on complex, lengthy and expensive coding of applications, or monolithic systems built from the ground up. What’s needed is a new way to build software—one that is faster, flexible and more “liquid.”Modular architectures
Liquid applications require enterprises to create application architectures that are modular, featuring reusable components sourced internally or externally. One of the key components is emerging software platforms, including platforms as a service, which provide well-defined technical architectures along with standards, Three new strategies for application development governance and reusable code. Platforms facilitate more rapid creation and assembly of liquid business solutions, as applications are increasingly assembled from prebuilt components. With a platform approach, companies can engage consumers while also opening their platform to other innovators.
For example of the power of platforms comes from one global consumer goods and services company. The company is in the process of implementing a multichannel commerce solution based on SAP applications. The new single, streamlined, interactive platform will help the company offer a seamless, more personalized and complete customer experience and allow the company to benefit from agile, flexible, streamlined and consistent technology and processes to support local market needs.
Next-generation integration techniques
Liquid applications must be underpinned by a liquid architecture that has important, new characteristics. Investment in flexible, standardized, open integration services provides the ability to efficiently connect applications and information across the company.
Orchestration and business process management services allow applications to be configured and continuously tuned to meet the needs of the business. And APIs provide the glue to enable reusable components to be accessed from within a company as well as by external customers and business partners. In some cases, SaaS solutions provide the platforms that deliver liquidity in the application environment.
2. INTELLIGENT APPLICATIONS
To manage growing volume, velocity and complexity, and to maximize the business value of internal and external data, companies need to embed software intelligence everywhere. Software intelligence is made possible by increased processing power, advances in data science, and innovations in natural language processing, machine learning and cognitive computing. Thanks to these advancements, software can be taught to automate decision making through rule-based algorithms, and evolve and innovate on its own through advanced learning techniques.By automating routine tasks, intelligent applications offload complexity and supplement human effort through technologies such as auto-correction and robotics. Intelligent automation improves productivity by doing more work in a fraction of the time with more accuracy.
Intelligent applications offer three critical capabilities—intelligent automation, integrated analytics and self-governance. Integrated analytics create systems that can analyze and comprehend independently, embedding intelligence in the processes themselves and radically improving both business and IT performance.
Intelligent applications can be taught to act as digital agents and to learn and govern themselves autonomously—revolutionizing customer service, IT management and business innovation. As software intelligence grows in sophistication, most applications will learn to evolve and adapt, altering their behavior and extending their capabilities based on experience.
3. CONNECTED APPLICATIONS
Connectivity in the age of the software- driven business is about more than application integration. It’s about creating new competitive frontiers using software. To grow revenue and defend their market position, businesses must open new dimensions of application connectivity—with business partner and customer ecosystems, as well as with the rapidly growing Internet of Things—that are essential to delivering new services.Connected applications are required to dynamically interface with business partner and customer ecosystems in today’s highly networked, digital business environment. When properly designed and managed, an ecosystem multiplies the power of all the participants, leading to combinations of functionality—and revenue opportunities—that would previously have been difficult to achieve.
Enterprises need multiphase strategies to build and nurture an ecosystem. Start—and learn—with your internal developers and business functions, and then create a broader ecosystem that includes external entities such as business partners and customers.
TAKING THE LEAD
Today, the business of applications is changing how companies operate and grow. No longer a supporting capability, applications are a driver of strategy and competitive differentiation. They can enable entirely new services for new markets. The future of applications is an exciting one for companies that are willing to develop a new operating model for software development and then fundamentally change the way they build software.
Liquid applications will become increasingly essential to consumer goods companies as every consumer becomes a digital consumer in every market, and as personalized experiences—not just personalized products—need to be delivered across channels.
Monolithic applications that are slow to change will no longer be able to meet companies’ needs, especially in a volatile environment with new competitors and new business models.
A new generation of intelligent applications is also necessary as consumer goods companies move from a mind-set where business intelligence is a reporting factory for events in the past, to a mind-set and capability of turning predictive insights into action. With intelligent applications, analytics becomes embedded in the process. As the amount of data generated by a consumer goods company continues to proliferate and sources increase, it is vital to develop an intelligent architecture to monetize the asset.
Finally, connected applications will become increasingly essential because the need to grow at speed in new markets requires the ability to effectively leverage a partner ecosystem. Creating connected applications also necessitates the creation of entirely new methods for managing the Internet of Things.
Both IT and business leaders must understand what it means to be a software-driven business. They need to understand how software can spur growth, shape new markets and reach new customers. And, they must work together closely to orchestrate new business solutions.
Pietro Pieretti is managing director – Global Consumer Goods & Services Technology at Accenture. Pietro works with large global consumer goods organizations to define and deliver transformation programs delivering value at the intersection of business and technology. His focus is on defining and delivering the roadmaps of industry leaders to be fit-to-win in the evolving markets, transform themselves to become truly digital and real-time enterprises by integrating digital technology and transforming the core back-ends Enterprise Solutions.
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