We must avoid making business apps disposable in the drive to consumerise IT

We have become "fickle" with software says ServiceNow's Chris Pope

In the modern world, more than ever, innovation is a ‘must-have', not a ‘nice-to-have'. That is why many large businesses have invested in creating a dedicated innovation team, whose responsibilities could range from dreaming up new ideas to weaving a story or theme through a long-term product roadmap.

Chris Pope is VP of Innovation at ServiceNow, and much of his role involves paying attention to long-term trends in the IT industry. One of those, which has formed part of the overarching topic of the Knowledge 19 show taking place in Las Vegas this week, has been the consumerisation of work.

At the conference's opening keynote, CEO John Donahoe talked about the difference in using apps like Uber or Deliveroo and business processes. "While our lives at home are simple and intuitive, our lives at work are complex and frustrating, he said. "Mobile technology has enabled us to completely transform our lives at home. [It] allows us to get what we want, when we want and how we want." On the other hand, trying to do something as simple as resetting your password on a work trip is equivalent to "brain damage".

Pope expanded on this theme, telling Computing, "You download an app on your phone, and if you're not quite satisfied, you just delete it and move on. And you download the next one. Applications have almost become disposable."

The same rules don't quite apply to business applications, which are often backed by significant investment and infrastructure, with integrations into other systems. However, employees can still voice their displeasure through shadow IT.

"I've got other options...that's your choice of interaction," said Pope. "It's not disposable in that sense, but [business apps] can easily be marginalised. You know, ‘Tom brought this thing out and it's not quite right, but I've got some budget; I'm going to go over here and do something'.

"I look at Salesforce, right? They got frustrated with IT so what did they do? They went around them, and they're wildly successful. And now IT are like, ‘Hang on, we, we own all that stuff', and the business has gone, ‘No, we do, but you're going to run it for us now. Congratulations'. That's the whole shadow IT thing."

Customisation is king in the world of business apps, and that is a major difference from the comparatively locked-down consumer world. This can be a real danger in enterprise, and another driver towards ungoverned, unregulated solutions that are not sanctioned by the IT department.

"The danger in enterprise software is we open it up [too much], and too many companies think they know better than the manufacturer. They go and customise and configure it, and then they're 12, 18 months down the road and they're like ‘Well, we're stuck, or our business processes have changed. We can't move - we've lost all of the agility that we were thinking about'."

In the modern world, it is not difficult to find a tool that will fulfil a function in a more convenient way than the prescribed system that IT dictates employees should use. However, this holds its own dangers, with issues around governance, data security/privacy and compliance.

"It creates a much bigger issue for you, and probably more work than you were probably anticipating if you had just listened in the first place and delivered a good solution from the original requirement," Pope concluded.