The best custom enterprise apps are like exceptional people — and even some commercial cement providers. They find a need, and they fill it.
To thrive competitively in The New Age of Service (Which is now, in case you were wondering or unsure), your company must become a service-oriented enterprise. And since almost all business-critical services depend upon IT, the transformation of your business into a service-centric enterprise would likely do well to begin by optimizing how IT delivers and manages services. Successes achieved there can then be extended to other enterprise departments.
If IT is to transform itself into the crucible in which effective processes for service relationship management are forged, it needs a delivery mechanism to reach the rest of the enterprise. Fortunately, that delivery mechanism exists, and promises to help businesses to succeed with service relationship management and in their efforts to become service-centric enterprises.
That delivery mechanism? Custom business applications.
Custom business applications can embody competitively significant business processes and practices. They can also often be more finely tuned to specific business needs than packaged applications, resulting in lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and greater adoption than packaged applications.
But there's a problem, or at least a challenge. It's one thing when IT chooses or is instructed to build a custom application for some strategic function such as something related to ERP or big data. It's another thing entirely when a line-of-business leader wants to build or modernize a custom application for a need or opportunity specific to his or her team.
That's because of the MOOSE, an acronym created by Forrester Research to describe what it costs to Maintain and Operate the IT Organization, Systems and Equipment. Forrester and CIOs interviewed by ServiceNow have said that "keeping the lights on" can suck up 50, 75 or even 80 cents of every IT budget dollar. This means that business users often must either try to build or modify the custom applications they want and need themselves, or wait weeks or months for IT to get around to those users' requests.
After all, IT is more than sufficiently challenged by the big projects it takes on. In 2012, consultancy McKinsey & Company analyzed more than 5,400 large-scale IT projects, each with a budget of $15 million or more in 2010 dollars. McKinsey found that such projects ran an average of 45 percent over budget and seven percent over scheduled delivery time, while delivering 56 percent less business value than promised or expected. Even worse, McKinsey found that software projects overran budgets by an average of 66 percent, while overrunning schedules by an average of 33 percent.
So business users often swallow hard and do the best they can with inadequate or outmoded tools. How many applications built with IBM/Lotus Notes, Microsoft Access or Microsoft SharePoint are in place at your enterprise, delivering inconsistent value while creating additional challenges neither IT nor the business needs? And how many of those applications are widely used, loved by users or clearly delivering maximum business value?
When crafted and implemented well, custom business applications embody proven processes and practices, attract, engage and satisfy users, and deliver clear and tangible business benefits. And when built and deployed on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform, those applications can be created and deployed quickly and easily, and place minimal new demands on the IT team responsible for managing and supporting them.
Even better, because the ServiceNow platform is so powerful, flexible and both IT- and user-friendly, it is changing the very nature of how custom business apps are created and supported at hundreds of enterprises. Instead of users submitting requests to IT and either being told "no" or receiving sub-par applications in response, users build exactly what they want themselves. On the same platform proven and understood (and sometimes even actively loved) by IT, other enterprise departments or both. No programming, endless iterations or user-IT friction required. Which is why so many people at so many enterprises consider the ServiceNow platform to be so "BAADaaS."
Evidence abounds. Check out our custom applications eBook. Or the on-demand Webinar "Be a 'BAADaaS' — Deploy 'Business Automation and Application Development as a Service.'" Or the one featuring the amazing applications created for the Knowledge13 Hackathon, "From Concept to Deployment — Custom Apps in About 10 Hours." Or the amazing apps built by past winners of and current finalists for the Innovation of the Year Award. And make sure to join the thousands of people who will be attending the 66 breakout sessions, 31 hands-on labs and three pre-conference training sessions devoted to custom apps at Knowledge14. As well as the Hackathon and Innovation of the Year competition. Then, as Ruth Stafford Peale (wife of Norman Vincent, who wrote "The Power of Positive Thinking") is credited with saying and living, "find a need and fill it" at your very own enterprise.
