The New Application

Delivery Playbook: The CIO’s guide to executing

a winning app strategy

Super Bowl XLVIII pitted the Denver Broncos against the Seattle Seahawks. Thanks to a

sound game plan and flawless execution, on the field and off, the Seahawks ran away with it.

In many ways, football is a great analogy for application development: the coach (CIO)

implements a system (platform) and set of plays (methodology) to help his team march toward

the goal (new apps). The reality, though, is that application development teams face countless

challenges, making them underdogs in the big game. This playbook is designed to help you

identify and overcome those obstacles, and execute a winning app delivery strategy.

CIOs: Are You Ready for the Big Game?

If application development was the Super Bowl, the IT team would be getting blown out.

According to the Standish Group, 94% of large IT projects are either in trouble or fail altogether.

Rather than suffer a humiliating defeat in the big game, let’s look at some of the team’s big

challenges and how to overcome them.

The Score: App Dev is Getting Blown Out

Application Delivery

IT teams today are hard pressed to deliver new

applications in tight timelines, whether to improve

existing processes or to help the business innovate or

capitalize on new opportunities.

Yet, as you may be painfully aware, custom

development projects plod along slowly, taking several

months or even years. In today’s fast-paced world, this is

simply unacceptable. And like a football team facing a

much quicker opponent, it can feel like sucking wind.

Play: Accelerate App Development Rather that getting outrun on every play, look for ways to speed up

application development. Many CIOs are turning to visual model-

driven development (MDD), which teams find more intuitive,

collaborative and quicker than traditional programming languages. A

benchmark study by global system integrator Capgemini found MDD

to be 5-6 times faster than C# and Java.

By shrinking project timelines down to weeks or days, your team will

march quickly toward the goal line, erasing any deficit along the way.

To bring home the Super Bowl trophy, all players must

be on the same page, working towards together a

common goal. Application development is no different;

yet, IT/business collaboration remains elusive.

Consequently, the process of translating user

requirements into working software is too complicated,

lengthy, and costly. More often than not, the business

doesn’t get what it needs and another project fails.

Game over.

Play: Bring IT and the Business Together Instead of keeping IT and the business on opposite ends of the

bench, look for a platform that brings them closer together and keeps

the entire team on the same page throughout the game.

For instance, a platform with social collaboration and project

management capabilities can help keep stakeholders aligned and

engaged. Moreover, visual application models—like football play

diagrams—are easily understood by the entire team, allowing

developers and business users to jointly build and review

applications to ensure better outcomes.

Great quarterbacks instantly read the defense and react

accordingly.

Unfortunately, this skill is lacking on most app dev

teams. Although they may see changing business

needs, they’re unable to react quickly enough.

As Forrester Research notes, “what most firms lack is a

predictable, stable approach to accommodating rapid

change as the norm.”

Play: Enable Agility & Flexibility In order to compete in today’s dynamic, fast-paced game, IT teams

must possess extreme flexibility and agility. At any time, they must be

able to quickly and easily call an audible—whether to accommodate

evolving requirements during the development process, or to

implement changes to applications in production.

By doing so, they can deliver what the business needs before the

play clock winds down, resulting in another loss of yardage.

Off-field distractions have proven costly to the focus and

productivity of many a football team.

The same applies to development teams. While their

focus should be on building great software, they

frequently get bogged down with deployment issues,

such as database and infrastructure set-up, security

concerns, and more.

Play: Eliminate Deployment Issues Keep your team focused on what really matters by completely

removing infrastructure and deployment issues from the equation.

One solution is an application platform as a service (aPaaS) that

includes the entire technology stack and automatically manages

operational tasks.

With these platforms, applications can be deployed to the cloud

literally with a single click. This way, your team can always keep their

eye on the ball.

Traditional application development approaches are

like washed up athletes: while they might have been the

‘go to’ in years past, they’re now too old and too slow to

compete with younger, faster players. Instead, they eat

up budget and clock, producing almost nothing in return.

As coach, it can be difficult parting ways with a player

that may have served your team well in the past. But it’s

time to shake things up and pave the way for your next

rising star.

Play: Sign the Emerging App Dev Star Forward-thinking CIOs are replacing traditional code-based

development approaches with enterprise application platforms as a

service (aPaaS) that combine visual model-driven development,

social collaboration, enterprise integration, and secure cloud

deployment.

What they find is that these new players are faster, cheaper, and far

more productive than their older counterparts.

A football team that is consistently struggling to score

doesn’t just tinker with its offense; it completely

overhauls the system.

The same holds true for application development.

Many CIOs have found that identifying incremental

improvements simply isn’t enough. In order to win the

app delivery game, they had to embrace an entirely

new way of building and deploying applications.

Who are these app delivery champions? You’ll see a

few examples on the next page. But what they all have

in common is their use of the Mendix App Platform.

Revamp the App Delivery Offense

The App Delivery Champions

Click helmets to learn more.