A world of Apps

Since I’ve been working in IT, there have been two seismic shifts in the technology landscape. The first was the advent of the PC, the second was the development of the internet. 

When the PC appeared on the scene, it was very much an end user driven phenomenon. At the time, I was working within the corporate IT function of a large retailer. The organisational mentality was very IBM mainframe oriented and highly centrally controlled. PCs were consigned to a group called ‘end user computing’, subject to director level sign off, and seen as an annoying inconvenience that had to be tolerated because the people asking for them had enough political clout. 

By the time the internet came along, I was working on global IT projects for organisations across a wide range of sectors. Again this new thing was viewed was a lot of confusion, suspicion and distain by the IT functions of these organisations. It was very much the end users, the people outside the IT organisation that drove adoption.

I believe we are on the cusp of the next revolution in IT and once again it will be driven by users not by the IT practitioners within our organisations. No, I’m not talking about social media, I’m talking about the ‘App’.

The App model, so expertly marketed by Apple, changes our whole approach to applications, not just on a smart phone or tablet, but across the whole IT landscape. It takes big applications and breaks them down into small pieces, where I only take the bits I want. 

While the Iphone/Ipad has got the most coverage over apps, many others are taking up the idea (or were already using it under a different guise). Let me give you some examples. The Drupal open source CMS is based on a core set of code built in modules. Because it is an open API, anyone can write and submit a module to augment the CMS. You can go to the Drupal website and find pretty much anything you need. You download it, install it in the right directory on your server, enable it and away you go. On the Drupal site, you can see how many times a module has been downloaded and get feedback from other users. In the commercial software world, Salesforce has a similar model for add-ons, particularly for tools to provide integration into other applications. 

Extend this idea into some of the traditional desktop applications we all use. Microsoft periodically release a new version of Office with lots of ‘enhancements’ and new features. Many of us have for a long time asked what practical difference the new versions make, and Microsoft is having a harder and harder time selling the benefits of these releases. For most people, they stretch word to fraction of its capability. I use Word a lot and what I mostly need is a few fonts, a few standard formats (heading, main text, bullet points etc.), find and replace, and spellchecker. There are probably a few other things I use, but most of the enhancements of the last ten years have given me very minimal gains. This is even more true when we come to spreadsheets (mainly used as a convenient list by most people), and presentation graphics (Powerpoint).

For most people, an App that does the core functions well is all they need, with a few people needing much more advanced capability. 

In the technology world, users drive revolutions, not central IT management. People want their favourite device. They will want their favourite Apps to do their work, not the rigid ‘standard desktops’ that IT best practice (low cost, high control) dictates. Central IT organisations will fight a rear guard action on security and data management which they will lose – they will have to deal with the new reality not try and stop it Canute like. The future challenge for IT is to deliver platforms that accept the plethora of devices and apps that will be used by the end user. They will need to dictate base standard file formats for the interchange of documents (which apps will deliver as standard); they will have to create robust security strategies that accept, not exclude, the diversity of end user devices and Apps; and they will have to become ‘App developers’ to integrate business applications that are based on packages hosted by a multiplicity of different providers.

Just as the Internet and the PC drove a profound shift in what IT functions do, the App is going to fundamentally change our approach to every aspect of IT delivery and management.