Enhance Your Enterprise Apps to Drive the Modern Digital Business

Many organizations are pursuing business transformation initiatives that directly impact existing enterprise applications portfolios. The trends in cloud and SaaS adoption are likewise driving increased application churn. Combined, these issues create greater need for a concrete enterprise application strategy enabled by application portfolio management.

The most effective enterprise application strategies are grounded in the business outcomes that applications are expected to deliver. Enterprises that do not align their applications strategy and business outcomes are significantly more likely to have unmanageable levels of technical debt.

Step 1: Establish the most significant guiding principles for applications.

IT strategic principles act as guardrails for decision making. The principles should focus on the areas of the IT and enterprise architecture strategy that are contentious or confusing; areas that are new to the enterprise; or areas that require a change in approach. Application principles should reflect how the company plans to deal with relevant trends in IT, such as AI, cloud computing or the release roadmap of a major software vendor.

Step 2: Conduct a “health check” of the application portfolio.

Applications often deteriorate in terms of business and technical fitness, resulting in higher costs and risk with less business value. A routine “health check” on each application in the portfolio allows you to assess whether it continues to support evolving business and technical needs. The assessment determines whether you will tolerate, invest, migrate or eliminate it (i.e., the TIME method) based on three dimensions:

• Business fitness — Does the application support the business capability well? Will it be able to do so as needs evolve?

• Technical fitness — Is the technology current, stable and maintainable? Can you find people to support it? What is the risk of failure of the software harming the business?

• Cost fitness — What is the relative cost of maintaining the application?

There’s an emergence of a new class of software technologies designed to automate and orchestrate end-to-end business processes while seamlessly connecting multiple enterprise systems of record through various integration methods. 

We call this class of technologies the business orchestration and automation platform (BOAT).

BOAT platforms integrate a common set of capabilities from technologies such as business process automation (BPA), robotic process automation (RPA) and integration platform as a service (iPaaS). They also incorporate advanced technologies like intelligent document processing and process mining.

BOAT platforms leverage specialized and generative AI (GenAI) to enable autonomous agents capable of performing a wide range of actions. The GenAI capabilities within BOAT typically focus on prompt-driven development, workflow design, targeted content creation, unstructured data extraction, orchestration of multiple large language models (LLMs) and more.

Enterprise application leaders will benefit from BOAT providers' native orchestration, integration and embedded intelligence, all offered with bundled licensing, and unified development and operations under a single platform.

Emerging technologies are becoming more widely available through cloud-based enterprise apps. The most notable is AI, including GenAI. In fact, one of the Gartner’s top strategic technology trends for 2024 is “intelligent applications” — i.e., intelligence in the form of AI features and functionalities becoming a foundational capability inside of applications, and expanding the roles that they can play across a broad range of employee- and customer-facing business activities.

We are seeing this trend play out, for example, in enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications for services companies increasingly providing cloud-based AI functionality for use cases such as spend category recommendations, invoice automation, expense forecasting and others.

Similarly for customer relationship management (CRM) applications, GenAI capabilities are enabling use cases such as value message creation, generative marketing content and digital presales assistance, to highlight just three examples.

The market for enterprise applications, or enterprise apps, is in the midst of major change. The demand for digital business is driving heightened interest in autonomous orchestration and advanced technologies like AI, with cascading effects for application architectures, strategies and teams.

But before we delve into those elements, let us define: What is an enterprise application?

Enterprise applications integrate the computer systems that run organizational operations and facilitate how work gets done across the enterprise. These apps integrate core business processes (e.g., sales, accounting, finance, human resources, inventory and manufacturing). An ideal enterprise system could control these business processes in real time via a single software architecture on a client/server platform. Enterprise software may also link the enterprise with suppliers, business partners and customers.

Four examples of enterprise applications include:

1. ERP solutions, from providers like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, etc.

2. CRM solutions, from providers like Microsoft, Oracle, Pegasystems, Salesforce and ServiceNow, etc.

3. Supply chain planning (SCP) solutions, from providers like Blue Yonder, Kinaxis, Logility, OMP or Oracle, etc.

4. Digital Workplace (DW) solutions, from providers like eShare, Google, Interact Software, LumApp, Microsoft, or Simpplr, etc.

Organizations that implement effective talent strategies for their IT workforce can enhance performance and exceed expectations on business outcomes, yet challenges from multiple fronts continue to plague application leaders.

Gartner’s Future of IT Skills Survey reveals only 14% of enterprise application leaders feel their IT workforce is very effectively prepared to meet their enterprise’s future skills requirements. These leaders tell us that their ability to plan and execute talent strategies in the enterprise applications function is hindered by several challenges.

To overcome these obstacles, enterprise application leaders must employ talent strategies to build a high-performing workforce. Gartner analysis of effective IT talent practices surfaced four distinct actions that result in high-performing enterprise app teams:

Action 1: Connected optimization

Effective enterprise app workforces are more likely to collaborate internally to fully leverage their organizations’ existing talent resources. Leaders work together to manage dependencies and uncover opportunities to share talent across the enterprise. They also find ways to delegate work so their highest skilled people can do more. Finally, the most effective organizations look at the larger context and change governance structures (e.g., decision and approval rights) to free up their critical talent.

Action 2: Accelerated upskilling

The most effective IT workforces are upskilled in an economically smart way that increases intrinsically motivated learning. When there’s a personal incentive and specific value in learning, time and attention pressures become less of a hurdle.