May 23, 2011
Deloitte Tech Trends 2011 – Almost Enterprise Applications
Almost Enterprise Applications is the third of 10 articles I am publishing from the Deloitte Tech Trends 2011 series
Business units have historically had a love-hate relationship with IT. In the early days, IT was an esoteric specialty, far removed from core business competencies yet consuming a big piece of the budget. IT was often seen as unresponsive, expensive or flat-out ineffective, but business leaders saw no other choice for essential process and information automation. IT was left to balance these harsh perceptions with the practical reality of providing secure, reliable and scalable solutions with zero tolerance for fault or failure.
Individuals and departments have taken on this re-emerging self-service approach before. In the 1990s, the client/server trend gave almost anyone the ability to put a small server under their desk and build a Visual Basic application to help perform their job. This eventually resulted in a sprawl of apps that were outside the control of, and not subject to the disciplines of, professional IT. Some of these apps were eventually determined to be central to the business, and the lack of formality in their pedigrees created risk for the business. The CIO often had to adopt or rationalize these efforts.
As a result of the cloud revolution, Software- and Platform-as-a-Service (SaaS, PaaS) capabilities are being eagerly embraced by many business leaders for reasons including predictable results, easy and rapid availability and a demystification of IT. Put simply, the resulting almost-enterprise applications can offer transparency in the value and cost for services, in terms understandable by the business, without the overhead too often perceived with central IT departments.
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