BUILD A BUSINESS CASE Intuitive and Innovative Approaches to Developing Custom Apps Quickly, Easily and Cost Effectively

Transcription

1 BUILD A BUSINESS CASE Intuitive and Innovative Approaches to Developing Custom Apps Quickly, Easily and Cost Effectively Table of Contents A New Model for Custom Applications... 2 Delivering Business Value Choosing the Right Platform... 4 Conclusion... 5 A TechTarget White Paper brought to you by

2 IT departments and the organizations they serve can reap dramatic benefits by codifying and automating unique processes through the development of custom applications. These applications can lower costs, improve agility, quicken time to value, give IT greater control,and bolster productivity throughout IT and among enterprise users. In fact, with the right tools in place, organizations can enable a new class of citizen developers who work either in or with IT to create applications and services that are highly responsive to business needs. A platform to enable this type of innovation is not only available, cost efficient and simple to deploy, but it may already be part of your IT environment. We are in a time of high expectations for IT departments. Business leaders talk about IT at the speed of business, with IT tasked to deliver unprecedented levels of agility, performance and availability to address changing business dynamics driven, in large part, by the technology itself. Forrester has referred to agility as the central business issue of our times 1, and IDC, among others, describes a new paradigm in computing driven by cloud services, mobility, social media and big data analytics. 2 With these types of expectations, it is critical that IT departments be responsive to the needs of the business and open to new ways of addressing problems. One of the key areas where IT can deliver significant business value is in the development of custom applications and services, for both the IT organization and the enterprise as a whole. With the right tools and platform in place, IT can dramatically speed up the time it takes to develop custom applications, while making it much simpler for nontechnical personnel to work tightly with business decision-makers to ensure that these new applications address specific business needs. What makes this type of accelerated and simplified development possible is the ability to build the applications on an existing platform. With the right underlying platform in place, organizations don t have to worry about building infrastructure to support the new applications, and they can leverage all of the data, knowledge and expertise that is already resident within the system and across the enterprise. What s more, IT can prevent the development of rogue applications by spearheading new development and keeping custom applications within the boundaries it circumscribes. 1 What Should EA Do for Business Agility? Forrester Research, Dec. 6, IDC Predictions 2012: Competing for 2020, IDC, Dec

3 A New Model for Custom Applications Dating back to the days of Lotus and VisiCalc, custom applications have played a critical role in the deployment of business services. All organizations have custom processes that are unique to their respective industry, size, corporate culture, business operations, customers and operating models. Custom applications enable organizations to automate operations and create simple-to-use processes and tools that make the business more productive, responsive, cost efficient and agile. IT departments, however, have typically faced challenges in controlling the development of custom applications. Often, these applications are created by individual departments or business units on an ad hoc basis, without the kind of centralized IT oversight that can add value to the overall business and ensure quality. Further, when IT does take control, the process of developing custom applications often ends up with software development teams, which means that development can become costly, complex and time consuming. IT now has the opportunity to change the model for developing custom applications by building them within a platform that either already exists within the organization or can be easily obtained without significant upfront capital investment. One model for this new type of custom application development is the ServiceNow App Creator, which is available as part of the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform. The concept is to use forms-based workflows and a simple point-click-publish approach to enable IT personnel of all skill levels from nontechnical employees to highly trained software developers to create applications for the IT department or work closely with business decision-makers to help them create custom applications to automate business processes of all types. This type of intuitive, simple-to-use approach can bring tremendous value to organizations in terms of reducing costs, accelerating development, aligning IT more closely with the business, and empowering both IT and business users to be far more proactive and efficient in developing services and applications to address their needs. Gartner has characterized this approach as the rise of citizen developers, which it defines as users who create new business applications for consumption by others through the use of development and runtime environments sanctioned by corporate IT. The research firm has predicted that citizen developers will build at least 25% of new business applications by Gartner Says Citizen Developers Will Build at Least 25 Percent of New Business Applications by 2014, Gartner, July 14,

4 Delivering Business Value The business case for deploying this new approach in developing custom applications is a powerful one, particularly given the challenges IT departments face in terms of speed and agility. Among the key business benefits are: Minimal upfront investment Many IT organizations already have the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform in place, so the technology is readily available to get started with minimal incremental investment. New customers can deploy ServiceNow without an expensive upfront investment because it is deployed through the cloud. And because ServiceNow is a cloud platform, IT doesn t have to invest in incremental hardware or other infrastructure that would normally be required to support application development. Reduced total cost of ownership Upfront investment is one aspect of TCO, but there are many other cost benefits that result from the adoption of this new model for developing custom applications. IT is able to deploy a range of new applications that enables it to be more productive, reduces operating expenses and enhances productivity among end users. The organization also saves money by putting the power of development in the hands of its citizen developers rather than using expensive software development teams, which can and should be devoted to larger and more complicated projects. Faster time to value A big part of measuring the success of any IT investment is time to value: How long does it take for the business to begin seeing benefits from the investment? By rapidly accelerating the development and deployment of custom applications, the IT department can dramatically speed up time to value. Applications that reduce costs, drive sales, enhance customer service or provide other value to the business will be ready far more quickly than if they were developed through traditional processes. An IT organization more closely aligned with the business Because the ServiceNow platform is designed for IT automation, the process of developing new applications will drive greater collaboration between IT personnel and business decision-makers. This means that the applications are far more likely to address the specific needs of the business and be easy to use, right from the outset. They will typically require less training and have the support of the people responsible for the particular line of business that will be using the applications. Within the IT department, applications can be developed that fit the specific needs of IT personnel and automating processes, making IT more productive and thus make the organization as a whole more productive. 3

5 Greater IT control By deploying new application development processes and procedures in a platform that is controlled by the IT department, the business will reap significant benefits. IT will be able to keep control of application development, minimizing or even eliminating rogue applications that operate outside of IT, which tend to isolate important business data and can fail to take advantage of data created in other areas of the business. By using a common platform to develop new applications, all applications can take advantage of the same user information, system information and business information basically, anything in the ServiceNow database. Plus, IT is already comfortable with and knowledgeable about the platform, so deployment is simplified. Keeping it simple There s tremendous business value in keeping things simple. By using a forms-based workflow and point-click-publish approach, more people can be involved in the creation of new applications, and they can create services that are much simpler for users to deploy. Simplicity makes everything faster and less expensive. What s more, by keeping development within an IT-based platform, IT can keep a closer eye on costs, development time, resources and governance. With simplified and centralized management, IT can ensure that efforts aren t being duplicated across the organization and that new applications developed in one area of the business can be maximized and leveraged to their fullest value in other areas. Choosing the Right Platform Successfully deploying this new citizen developer model for creating applications is dependent upon having the right platform in place one that is managed by the IT department, not one that circumvents the IT department. ServiceNow has significant advantages over other solutions because it is already used by a large number of IT organizations to manage a wide range of IT services. Hundreds of customers have already developed thousands of applications on the ServiceNow platform. Custom applications built in ServiceNow automatically leverage all of the benefits of the platform, including data sharing between applications, workflow automation, reporting, collaboration and security. 4

6 Conclusion Custom applications deliver significant value. They provide the opportunity to automate unstructured work processes to make the business far more innovative, efficient and competitive. With the right tools, organizations can maximize the value of custom applications by accelerating and simplifying their development, and enabling IT to manage them in close alignment with business decision-makers. And by using a platform optimized for the development of custom applications, businesses can reduce costs, lower TCO, enhance agility and accelerate time to value for new business services. The business case is compelling, and the technology is available. There s no reason to wait. Find out how your organization can benefit by working with ServiceNow to simplify and accelerate the development of custom applications. For more information, please visit 5