Fast & Collaborative Application Delivery. How Mendix Fits Within Gartner s Pace-Layered Model

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Fast & Collaborative Application Delivery

How Mendix Fits Within Gartner’s Pace-Layered Model

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Far too many business opportunities are lost simply because

innovation projects are treated the same way as core enterprise

systems. With demand from the business growing rapidly, IT

leaders are under pressure to better manage and prioritize their

application needs. Using Gartner’s Pace-Layered Application

Strategy in conjunction with the Mendix App Platform, IT can

deliver high-impact systems of differentiation and innovation with

the speed, agility and collaboration required by the business.

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worse, many attempt to solve new challenges using old methodologies and tools. This means that far too many business opportunities are lost simply because innovation projects are treated the same way as core enterprise systems. Thus, it’s critical that IT leaders consider all application needs and prioritize and manage them accordingly.

INTRODUCTION

The success of your company increasingly hinges on how well you differentiate your offerings and innovate in ways that move the needle forward. In today’s

technology-driven world, that means developing more lightweight, user-friendly apps to support unique processes and new business models. This includes connecting siloed systems to deliver intuitive user experiences and driving multi-channel interactions with customers, partners and suppliers.

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SHOULD ALL APPLICATIONS BE CREATED EQUALLY?

In today’s diverse IT environment, one thought becomes

overwhelmingly apparent: not all business applications are equal. Some are meant to do the heavy lifting of highly standardized, even regulated processes.

These systems are often identical from one company to another and form the backbone of a company’s operations and financial transactions. Examples include ERP, CRM,

and other core systems. They are significant implementations, making migrations unlikely and customizations costly and time-intensive.

Beyond these core systems, the business likely amasses a variety of other applications, focused on differentiating or innovating the business. These apps make your business unique, and are likely a function of whatever ideas your

employees have and develop. These are often business led projects and tie directly into strategic priorities. As such, the urgency on such development projects is typically very high.

In these examples, we illustrate the range of applications that exist within most organizations, from generic operational systems to highly specific business solutions. We also touch upon the development resources that may be required for each, including timelines and priorities.

Given the variety of ongoing and new projects that exist within each IT department, it can be difficult to know how to proceed. In the end, your application development strategy must be tailored in a way that provides the right level of support for systems across the spectrum.

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THE 3 DISTINGUISHING LAYERS

A differentiated and multi-layered approach such as Gartner’s Pace-Layered Application Strategy allows IT leaders to build a more effective application delivery strategy. This is achieved by segmenting business applications by the problems they address, their rate of change and the distinctiveness of the business capabilities they facilitate.

This framework recognizes that applications are fundamentally different based on how they’re used by the organization. The three distinguishing pace-layers are systems of record, systems of differentiation and systems of innovation.

Looking at existing applications and future development projects in this way raises the question: Why apply the same application delivery model to differentiating and innovative projects as you do maintenance to your

systems of record?

Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini, makes a perfect analogy: “Too many enterprises are using ‘bus and train tools’ to build and maintain their ‘car and scooter’ applications.” In other words, the slow-moving, IT-centric development process common for systems of record is inappropriate when building a system of differentiation or innovation. It’s no wonder that so many projects are delivered late — or never at all.

Systems of Innovation

Systems of Differentiation

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THE 3 DISTINGUISHING LAYERS

No matter the business, there is always some degree of conflict between business and IT

stakeholders. This may relate to prioritization, speed of delivery, governance, or any number of other options.

Different Business Needs Require Different Development Strategies

According to Gartner

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_:

Business managers and users are looking for modern, easy-to-use applications that can be quickly deployed to solve specific problems.

Leadership teams are looking for ways to mitigate risks or take advantage of market opportunities. Meanwhile, the IT organization is typically working toward a strategic goal of standardizing on a limited set of comprehensive application suites to minimize integration

A pace-layered application strategy can alleviate much of the conflicting needs between stakeholders. The strategy provides an organized view of all existing applications and aims to categorize new applications appropriately as ideas arise. This process helps prioritize development projects in a less biased fashion. Specifically, the strategy asks

stakeholders to weigh each project based on development estimates and each layer’s ability to generate business value.

When looking specifically at systems of differentiation and innovation, IT teams need to focus on three main components in order to ensure successful outcomes:

1. Speed of development

2. Ability to adapt to changing business requirements

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THE 3 DISTINGUISHING LAYERS

It’s important to recognize that these layers do not exist within a vacuum. Therefore, a system of record for one business may actually be a system of differentiation for another business. In this scenario, it’s important for IT and business leaders to be in agreement regarding definitions that pertain to their specific business environment.

For example, ERP extensions are a common need among enterprise business units. In this case, a system of differentiation is built on top of a system of record in order to enable a particular business process or provide a business unit with some functionality not supported by the original enterprise system.

Finally, remember that applications may move down pace-layers. This occurs as applications become more engrained in the organization’s operating procedures and as IT can create repeatable processes for maintenance.

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Design

Capture, refine and prioritize user stories; estimate, plan and monitor sprints; manage releases; etc.

Build

Build applications with visual model-driven development to promote communication, productivity, quality and short iterations.

Deploy

Provision and manage apps in the cloud, including one-click

deployment; manage test, acceptance and production environments.

UTILIZING THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR

SYSTEMS OF DIFFERENTIATION AND INNOVATION

The Mendix App Platform is the ideal setting for delivering your systems of differentiation and innovation. The platform enables IT teams to build enterprise-class, multi-channel, and integrated applications in a faster, more flexible, and collaborative manner. It does this by combining visual, model-driven development, 1-click deployment, social collaboration and central app governance in one complete platform.

Mendix seamlessly supports the entire application lifecycle:

Manage

Manage all applications from a single dashboard, ensuring availability, security, performance and scalability.

Iterate

Gather feedback, including end user input, and use in the next cycle of capture-develop-deploy-iterate.

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INNOVATION IN ACTION

The Mendix App Platform is ideal for IT groups who utilize the pace-layered application strategy, specifically for building systems of differentiation and innovation. Read on to see how LV=Insurance, The Boston Globe, and Kao all utilize the platform as part of their development strategy.

Systems of Innovation

LV= market tests new insurance products quickly

Systems of Differentiation

The Boston Globe manages unique processes across its business

Extending Systems of Record

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LV=, one of the U.K.’s leading

insurers, turned to the Mendix App Platform to pursue initiatives that were too costly and time-intensive with traditional development. This includes delivering high-value applications that streamline broker interactions and support the

development of innovative new insurance products.

For instance, a team of two

developers quickly built a complete product engine with end-to-end capabilities for Web sales, customer self-service, claims management

SYSTEMS OF INNOVATION:

LV= Market Tests New Insurance Products Quickly

and financial collections. By taking a modular approach and building

reusable components, each subsequent launch has gotten even faster.

According to Rod Willmott, LV=’s fast track innovation director, “We’re now at a stage we can launch an insurance product with 6 weeks of development effort. That was unheard of.”

While not all of the new products are commercially successful, that’s fine, notes Willmott, because “we can find out the market reaction without the huge investments of time and money in IT. That’s a major advantage for us.”

HEAR MORE FROM LV= WATCH THE VIDEO

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Newspaper publisher, The Boston Globe, has adopted Mendix to rapidly deliver dozens of applications that support unique processes across its newsroom, advertising and finance departments. Examples includes:

SYSTEMS OF DIFFERENTIATION:

The Boston Globe Manages Unique Processes Across Its Business

WATCH WADE’S PRESENTATION FROM MENDIX WORLD 2014

Newsroom Corrections

The Globe migrated a legacy Lotus Notes app for entering, tracking and reporting on corrections. What took over a month to code in Lotus took just five days with Mendix.

Ad Imaging

This application allows the Globe’s advertising team and self-service customers to add photos to classified ads. Using Mendix, it was built by one developer in 20 days.

Freelance Management

This app automates the process of managing the newspaper’s 500-plus freelancers. Despite

extensive workflows across multiple departments, it was built by two developers in 30 days, whereas it took the Globe one year to build similar functionality with a larger staff.

Wade Sendall, vice president of IT at The Boston Globe, commented that “Using the Mendix platform, we can do things we simply wouldn’t have been able to do using traditional development methods because Mendix is so much faster and easier. The platform has allowed our IT department to become an enabler and change agent within the organization.”

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Kao, a multi-billion dollar

manufacturer of premium beauty-care brands, used Mendix to quickly extend its existing SAP CRM system with a new mobile order entry app. The app is fully integrated with SAP, giving sales reps real-time access to inventory information and immediate entry of their orders.

According to Dan Gordon, Application Group Manager for Kao, customizing SAP to deliver the

EXTENDING SYSTEMS OF RECORD:

Kao Builds A Mobile Order Entry App On Top Of SAP

same functionality would have required a “lengthy and expensive project.” Using Mendix, the application was

delivered 10 times faster than estimated using traditional approaches. Each of the app’s 12 interfaces to SAP were developed within 2-3 days (rather than the 30 days quoted).

“We were able to get this application out extremely fast, and moving forward, we can react quickly to business

requests for changes or new solutions,” said Gordon.

HEAR MORE FROM KAO WATCH THE VIDEO

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TAKE THE CRITICAL PATH FOR BUSINESS INNOVATION

In today’s technology-driven world, custom applications are the cornerstone of business innovation. But the stakes are high; missed market opportunities, lack of innovation, competitive threats, and business costs are all common issues that can derail future growth.

The vision of Gartner’s pace-layered application strategy combined with the development power of the Mendix App Platform gives IT teams an innovative edge. Seize new business opportunities and significantly reduce time-to-market for your innovative applications with a faster, more flexible and more collaborative app delivery approach.

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Mendix is the app platform company for the enterprise. We enable companies to build, integrate and deploy web and mobile applications faster and with better results, effectively driving ROI in

days not months. Learn more, join our user community and get started for free at now.mendix.com.

Fast & Collaborative Application Delivery. How Mendix Fits Within Gartner s Pace-Layered Model