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How Do SaaS and PaaS Impact Bespoke Applications in the Enterprise?

Bespoke applications are used only within an organization and not marketed or sold externally to customers. They are usually developed by an internal software development team but organization may also hire external resources to build a bespoke app. In my career, I have worked with bespoke applications for asset management, ticket management, etc. that were intentionally developed for internal-only use. I have also come across application that were developed with the intent to be sold to customers, or came from acquisitions but again with the intent to commercialize the acquired technology. Then priorities change, external customers move on to other vendors, and when the dust settles, only one internally deployed instance of the application remains: a bespoke application.   The key benefit of a bespoke application is that it only follows organization’s own requirements and is therefore customized to the specific needs of the organization: it connects to other bespoke components, uses i
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Mobile Enablement

Mobile enablement is an important part of any enterprise IT strategy. Years ago the picture was black and white: there were “workstation anchored employees” that sat in offices and used wired devices (phones, computers) to do their job and there were “mobile employees” that were on the road most of the time (field sales and marketing would fit into this category) and relied on mobile phones to stay in touch. Over the years, many additional types of mobile behavior emerged. There is the “neighborhood collaborator” type that moves around the office and collaborates with peers. The trend towards open office environments definitely encourages this type of mobility.  The “campus mobile” type applies to larger companies where employees have to move across buildings to collaborate. As virtual meeting tools become more powerful, I am seeing a trend towards joining the virtual meeting instead of walking to the physical one, especially with large campus sizes, where it takes 15-20 minutes
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Employee Experience

Recently, I have been looking at the relationship between employee experience and employee productivity / corporate productivity. Employee experience is a relatively new topic in IT. While there is a lot of research about customer experience and how it impacts the corporate bottom line, the research around employee experience is limited. In the process, I found a good article in Harvard Business Review “Why the Millions We Spend on Employee Engagement Buy Us So Little” by Jacob Morgan. It turns out there is a lot more research on the relationship between employee engagement and performance but the results were not very encouraging: performance gains are short lived and when the effects of the engagement fade, the performance goes back down. No wonder that now the industry is looking at employee experience as the next possible way to increase employee productivity. Employee experience is defined more broadly than just having good tools at work and includes the office environment
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