Breaking the Vicious Circle: Business Dynamics and Application Platforms

Europe is an increasingly dynamic business environment. IT decision makers strive to keep pace by adding new functionality to their application environments, yet most fail to adequately plan for the integration and impact of new features on their existing application platforms. This creates a vicious cycle of new functionality leading to an overwhelming volume of application maintenance. In turn, this cripples an IT department’s capability to respond swiftly to new business dynamics.

In this paper, Datamonitor outlines a starkly different approach: a virtuous cycle of “adaptive innovation” based on an agile application platform that exploits the opportunity cost of maintenance. It enables IT departments to readily innovate and absorb change by providing a flexible platform to build, update, and trial new applications. It is a low-risk and pragmatic approach, because innovation occurs within a proven platform and may take place gradually, one application at a time. Not only does an agile application platform reduce maintenance, it also lowers the cost of delivering new application functionality. By moving resources away from maintenance, IT decision makers could garner a return on their investment and align IT more closely with broader business goals.

The findings in this paper are based on a survey of more than 270 IT decision makers in the UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and Germany.