Businesses' data use cases remain strong

Getting data where it's needed is a high-level app development feature.

No matter the department in question, information access is vital within today's companies. The exact nature of the data in each section will naturally shift and change, but the fact remains that basing decisions on a collection of facts rather than employee intuition is likely to yield strong results. This is something to keep in mind when developing applications.

The need for data Employees want tools that make their roles easier, which could mean granting access to a wide range of data. Such functionality could come from custom business applications. These apps have applicability in a number of departments. Sales and marketing professionals, for example, can improve their efforts at outreach if they know exactly what the market is currently doing. Such details can be gleaned from observation and intuition, but a more unbiased and incisive look could come from access to information.

Sales professionals aren't the only ones with strong information access use cases. Internal departments based on managing and governing performance, for instance, can harness a wide variety of internal statistics to ensure that everything is working correctly and productivity is in line with expectations. If not, they can prescribe action. This is another type of measurement that may be much more accurate and immediate when delivered by data rather than pure observation. Armed with information-based insights, professionals can improve their own firms' operations.

Granting access When selecting an application development framework, it's important to consider the types of software products that this is meant to create. If business intelligence tools are part of the intended goal, this means data accessibility is a vital feature. A Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) option with built-in data integration features is therefore a good choice. Rather than dealing with a range of different APIs that are prone to change, employees can employ a single interface and rest assured that their information will make it into the applications, even when combining many and varied sources.

If these PaaS solutions have easy-to-use interfaces, than the path between professionals and data may become even more direct. Letting employees outside of the IT department quickly build their own solutions based on templates allows them to gain the business intelligence capabilities they need while the dedicated application developers are still hard at work on the next generation of complex tools. In the right hands, information can be a valuable resource for companies. Well-designed app development platforms will help make the connection between end-users and the data that can enrich their everyday tasks and processes.