Almost a year back, Gartner predicted "That by 2017, 25 Percent of Enterprises Will Have an Enterprise App Store".
While there can be many reasons quoted for the outburst of Enterprise App Stores, in this blog, I would like to focus more on how these app stores help the innovation culture in various companies.
My views are based on the experience of working with a team of motivated developers and stakeholders building an internal store for SAP during the last year.
1. Business knows the solution
It is obvious that each business knows its processes and problems better, but finding the solution seemed to be difficult. It was the problem of either too many or too less solutions available in the public domain catering to the specific business problems. With channeling of the right solutions through app store, business users get the opportunity to choose the right one for their case like HR-Productivitity, Sales etc.,. Selecting one among the better choices can be seen as a first step towards innovative thinking. In addition, app stores provide a better feedback and review mechanism to build the right solution specific to the business.
2. Availability of easy-to-use technology
Many times, knowing the solution does not help building one. Modern app building platforms are easy-to-use for the IT department or even the business users. These start from easy resources on internet for basic Android/iOS/Windows applications to enterprise-ready mobile platforms, gateways, responsive UI options from SAP. Even the marketing and delivery is taken care, as developers just need to upload their own apps and enterprise app store takes care of the efficient delivery to target end-user. These provide the necessary tools to the small enterprise developers to build their home grown solutions easily compared to customizing the large generic solutions.
3. Knowledge of enterprise norms
Building an app targeted for a specific company reduces the complexity to a major extent, as one need not worry about the variety of norms to be followed in building a generic product. These include regional and country specific legal terms. As an app developer, it gives enormous freedom to focus on the business problem. The rest of terms are easily handled by the company's IT and legal departments.
4. Proximity to the user
The biggest of the usability issues are solved working with the end-users. if the user is same as the developer or the neighbour, the usability issues can vanish fast. Moreover, app stores have the flexibility of providing different app for the specific needs of each user, without the worry of resusability, leading to greater user satisfaction.
5. Culture of Innovation
Almost, all the enterprises are leaning towards the culture of innovation in their business processes to have a competitive edge. The culture starts from home and the enterprise app stores act as hubs to promote innovation within a company. These innovations also could be monetized later. As the consumer experience is merging with the enterprise world, app stores seem to be no exception. It could also slowly turn into a crowd-sourcing platform.
In simple,
if you need an app for your business problem, search your company's app store, find one.
if you did not find, provide feedback, you will get one from an enthusiastic innovator sitting next to you.
