Cloud services and the world of small applications

How many of you have downloaded anything to a corporate system that wasn’t approved or distributed by your IT department? Probably most of you.  It wasn’t malice that drove you. You probably spotted a tool that could make you more productive and, quite rationally, decided having it was a good idea.

These technology alternatives, and especially the functionality embedded in mobile apps, can help make us more collaborative and more productive.

If you have been developing traditional apps – the kinds of things that are mission-critical, bulletproof, and able to do a huge range of “things” – the mobile app world and its ethos of quick, light deployment and limited, highly targeted capabilities, can seem pretty foreign.

However, consider another perspective. For the enterprise, mobile app development can be a way of unlocking value – the value already built into back-end systems and in databases, for example. Mobile apps can provide a targeted way to make this more readily available to existing users, or maybe available to new users for the first time.

This new style of development also begs for a new style of delivery – the corporate app store. Apple and Google showed the way, and this model works well for delivering vetted applications to the right people inside your organization or to customers or partners.

But if there’s one thing this is not, it’s business as usual. Above all, the new world of apps is about delivering at an entirely new level of speed and efficiency.