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Custom Apps Already Showing Their Potential

Joshua Hoffman
September 22, 2015

Many businesses are beginning to work hard to customize applications and services in an effort to develop more nuanced operational functions. However, many organizations can be overwhelmed by the complexity of creating strategic, custom apps, and end up falling behind competition. Business process management tools are beginning to resolve these issues as they now provide application development platform functions that simplify custom app creation.

The need for simpler custom app development is evidenced in a recent CDWstudy, which found that businesses are already beginning to get a competitive advantage out of custom apps.

Custom apps can give companies an edge

TheCDW study found that organizations are embracing custom apps. The mobility revolution has fueled so much app innovation in the enterprise that businesses are enlisting more apps than ever. At this point, they use approximately six pre-designedapps for every five custom apps, and the companies that are embracing custom apps are gaining a competitive edge. A couple of the most noteworthy findings in this area include:

    • Custom apps tend to save workers approximately 7.5 hours of time each week compared to an "off-the-shelf" solution.

    • Approximately 25 percent of organizations polled are already getting a competitive advantage from custom apps.

    • Security, data availability and business alignment are the top priorities for custom apps.

    • Sales, business/operations and IT users are the primary groups leveraging customized applications.

    • Approximately 82 percent of respondents believe custom apps have created revenue.

"Leading BPM solutions put low-code functionality into users' hands."

All of these statistics point to the reality that custom apps and services are already beginning to deliver meaningful value to businesses. With this in mind, companies no longer need to be asking about whether they should or shouldn't invest in custom apps. Instead, the discussion can focus onthe best way to develop custom solutions. BPM tools can help.

Using BPM to simplify custom app development

Low-code development principles allow non-tech users to customize graphical user interfaces and other portions of an application, such as process workflows, without needed to dig into the code. Leading BPM solutions that work as application development platforms will put this low-code functionality into your users' hands, letting them optimize existing apps and services to meet their specific needs.

Optimizing business processes is increasingly dependent on having app architectures that align with operational needs. The ability to customize apps based on specific business requirements is invaluable in this area, and BPM software that supports low-code development is a major asset in this area.