The EY Tech Horizon report, published in March 2020, sought to understand the common practices that help them respond to disruption to their advantage and achieve better financial performance. To that end, the core team surveyed 500 large corporations and 70 startups in nine sectors: consumer products and retail; education; energy; financial services; health and life sciences; hospitality; industrial; technology, media and entertainment and telecoms; and transportation and logistics. The goal of the survey was to determine where companies are on their transformation journey and how they use technology to enable it.

Enterprise app development is critical

As per the survey, companies identified as leaders are advanced on their journey toward transformation, are generating significant financial value from technology innovations and are making efforts to build a transformative culture. While those identified as lagging behind in transformation are not advanced on their digital journeys, are not bringing tech innovations to market and are not trying hard to build a transformative culture.

Key enterprise application strategy drivers

Today’s leaders understand that in order to thrive in this constantly changing world, brands must adapt quickly and invest in digital transformation with three value drivers – humans at the center, technology at speed and innovation at scale. Therefore, every organisation looking to make a breakthrough in their industry must chalk their transformation game plan with these in mind.

How does enterprise application development work?

In case you are keen to know, enterprise application software are actually large scale software packages that perform business functions such as order processing, procurement, production scheduling, customer information management, energy management, and accounting. These functions may all be managed together on a single application or run separately for each department. While there is no paucity of SaaS ERP applications in the market that come at a small price and provide a bare-bones level functionality, large enterprises often find more success with customised solutions that suit their company structure and processes. So, they prefer to invest in enterprise application development.

Challenges of enterprise application development

1. Legacy software

Don’t get us wrong; we are all about legacies. But sometimes legacies that helped your business thrive in the past become outdated. The world is evolving faster than ever and in order to stay in the game you will need to reflect and evaluate every now and then, if your legacy becomes a burden instead of being an asset. Getting out from under your legacy system at the right time is essential to building yourself up in our digital world and staying relevant. This digital transformation ends up requiring not just innovation and perseverance, but in most cases, a lot of money, time and resources.

2. Asynchronous transformation

A few years ago, American car company, Ford, attempted to digitally transform by creating a new segment called Ford Smart Mobility. The goal was to build digitally enabled cars with enhanced mobility. Unfortunately, this new segment wasn’t integrated into the rest of the company and lacked cohesion with other units. The brand lost too much money and its stock price took a dive. Not long after, the CEO (at the time) stepped down. Many companies that do manage to digitally transform, tend to overlook one of the most crucial elements of success that is employee training and 360-degree integration, which leads to an overwhelming need for IT support, wasted resources, user frustration, stress and low productivity.

3. Changing focus

Any transformative efforts undertaken by an enterprise must focus on how it will provide meaningful value for your employees and customers. Most enterprises make the mistake of focusing on quantity instead of quality. They start out with a focus, but end up digressing significantly during the enterprise app development process, ending up with technology that is either too complicated or too scattered to yield much benefit. Others struggle to navigate the software, capital and technology required. They end up fearing the failure of their idea, their business and their ability to maintain profitability. This cycle of fear is followed by inertia that leads to wasted human potential on an epic scale.

4. Scalability and security

Let’s suppose that an enterprise sees a drastic change in landscape or signs a big merger or acquisition. Such a development would require an enterprise to also adapt their software quickly and securely. In most cases, this isn’t possible because enterprise software development often doesn’t take these use cases into account during the build journey leaving them without a scalable, flexible architecture to support new needs. Security remains the foremost concern of every enterprise - especially with the ever-rising hacks and data breaches occurring across the world. Therefore, an enterprise application must have additional features like encryptions and firewalls at application, host and network level, user privacy and data protection, timely data backups, regular software updates that include latest security patches and so on. Interested to learn more? Click right here to read our detailed blog on enterprise security.

How to overcome common challenges that plague enterprise software development

Let go of legacies that don’t serve you anymore, integrate digital transformation efforts with the rest of the company, and most importantly, choose the right transformation partner that offers not only a scalable architecture but also best-in-class security features and regular software updates. Builder.ai exists to keep in mind every single one of the challenges we’ve talked about today, that are faced by start-ups and enterprises alike during digital transformation and are proud to have delivered some phenomenal products since. Check out some of our most proud projects here.

At Builder.ai, we make software development as easy as ordering pizza for enterprises. We don’t just do app development, either! With our other products including Builder Cloud and Studio One, we help thousands of businesses build, run and scale successful ideas. Want to learn more?