A Gartner report, “Predicts 2014:Application Development” states “Application Developments(AD) have growing capabilities gap between the services and skills needed by organizations and the internal AD team’s ability to deliver them at the required scale”.

The report elaborated on how AD teams have adapted to agile development methodologies and mobile application development in a much better way. One of the largest gaps/problems the IT industry is facing in terms of AD is that, the industry is not able to keep pace with the immense changing trends in the business.  This year in most organizations the senior management would be focusing on identifying the correlation between a commitment to “user-centered design” work and the company’s “market value”. R&D budgets that were once driven by traditional application development work, will see money being redirected towards user-centered design that will need to be integrated back into AD.

Having said all that, an enterprise CIO must focus more on the betterment of the following goals,

Goal #1: To increase market value

Scenario in 2014: Traditional application development expenditures will be redirected to discrete user-centered design activities

Suggested Solution: Look for ways to close the gap between the user experience of employee-facing IT systems and that of systems in the consumer market.

Goal #2:  To reap the best benefits out of optimization

Scenario in 2014: Functionality, reliability, performance efficiency, usability, portability, maintainability, security and compatibility are vitally important attributes for optimization, yet few internal IT organizations have the necessary skill sets to address them effectively.

Suggested Solution: Look at planning for optimizing your applications, with advice and guidance.

Goal #3: To make the best use of agile methodologies

Scenario in 2014: Most organizations lack mature agile capabilities. Experience with tactical use of agile methods or semi agile methods, is more common than a full agile SDLC.

Suggested Solution:  Grow your own agile center of excellence through training and pilot projects or work with a partner who has a well-established agile COE. Follow a method that you are comfortable with, do it your way!

So this year, the AD teams would have to match up to the pace of changing business trends. IT applications being the face of the business must definitely be “user-centered”.  And it is obvious that IT applications have a larger and key role in directly contributing to the market value of the business!

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