Innovation is the key

OutSystems South Africa director, Craig Terblanche.

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With today's budget restraints, it seems virtually impossible for IT to meet all business demands. Therefore, IT needs to respond rapidly and innovate in order to stay relevant, says Craig Terblanche, director of OutSystems South Africa.

How will IT meet increasing business expectations, rapid increases in the pace of business and technological change, shrinking technology adoption life cycles, and a shortage of skills and resources?

According to Gartner and various other analyst reports, most IT budgets are spent just keeping the lights on (KTLO). More concerning is that backlogs are compounding annually at a rate of between 10% to 20% and more than 40% of the initial cost of an application is spent year after year to maintain it.

Terblanche explores the root causes of IT inefficiency and discusses methods companies have used to overcome them, turning their IT departments into innovation superstars.

"Considering Gartner's IT spending forecast stating that enterprise-wide IT spending is close to US$4 trillion, one would think that the IT industry - with all its engineering brainpower - would be at the forefront of efficiency and automation," he states.

Money wasted on maintenance is a sad enough story, but there is a second rail of inefficiency - endemic to all industries and geographies - that is even more troubling. It is based entirely on the accumulation of new service or change requests made by business units that IT has a hard time delivering on.

He says this failure to deliver is due to limitations ranging from a weak budget to a lack of resources and skills. "We say 'weak' rather than inadequate budget as in many cases the budget is misplaced. If 80% or more is spent KTLO, do two things - find a way to change this and prioritise your budget for innovation. Budgets are locked into legacy and the real problem is that enterprises seldom or never retire legacy."

Business units faced with a critical need for new applications, and where an IT department that is unable to respond, business will end up doing one of two things. They will find a way to solve the problem by building their own applications or 'renting' cloud-based solutions. These cloud-based solutions do not require IT's involvement, at least initially.

Terblanche says the solution is a roadmap to high performing IT. "A high-performance IT has a clear strategy for each type of application it is asked to deliver and maintain. It understands that the approach and technology it needs to use is different, depending on the functional and non-functional requirements that need to be supported. The focus must be on functional or business requirements."

OutSystems Platform has been architected from the ground up to support fast delivery of custom applications, built for continuous change. It is the ideal platform to support your business requirements of differentiation and innovative applications.

"All the tools you need to effectively support your IT transformation journey are provided. Easily integrate with existing systems and quickly extend them with custom interfaces. This will keep legacy systems safe and ultimately eliminate the need to customise packages. Build new applications fast to address innovation requests and create differentiating applications in days and weeks, not months," Terblanche explains.

"Build all the quick and dirty apps you want while knowing their ability to scale is ensured. All applications are "built to change". Changing applications quickly, without breaking anything, is guaranteed - across your entire application portfolio. We have delivered countless successful POCs as proof," he adds.

All applications built with OutSystems Platform inherently deliver on all non-functional requirements (NFRs) ? namely maintainability, portability, reliability, scalability, flexibility, auditability, documentation, performance, security and usability. All your NFRs are included right from the start. Focus on solving business problems knowing that your technical debt will shrink. OutSystems R&D is taking care of the challenge of reducing your technical debt.

"With OutSystems Platform you control the cost of change, increase productivity and help your business innovate, it's an innovation department in a box," he concludes.