Blueprint for an Application Factory: How a small team of Solution Creators can create enterprise applications at scale and speed

In build vs. buy decisions, “build” often carries the biggest uncertainties.

• How much will it cost?

• How long will it take?

• Do we have the resources with the skills to deliver?

• Can we maintain the solution?

Struggling with these practical questions, IT departments have been slow to support custom development projects outside of mission-critical domains.

What they’re missing: Modern low-code solutions have taken the risk out of the “build” decision for custom development.

Modern low-code solutions are easy to deploy and easy to learn. With these low-code enterprise application platforms, individuals or small teams working within an “Application Factory” can deliver enterprise-grade software on a timeframe measured in weeks and months rather than quarters and years.

It’s a question of agility: Project agility to adapt throughout the software creation process, and business agility to seize opportunities as they arise.

An Application Factory keeps pace with change via swift digital transformation, elevating IT’s value as a trusted partner throughout an organization.

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The maturity gap

Every software solution, no matter the size now requires the same level of excellence as mission-critical solutions

Let’s start by understanding the maturity gap between purchased or licensed software and the typical in-house development effort.

Business solutions can be broadly categorized into three main types:

1. Mission-critical: Essential core solutions built by teams of specialist professional developers who provide full lifecycle support

2. SaaS: Standardized offerings, often departmental in scope, offering API connectivity to extend the solution outside of the solution.

3. Everything else: Makeshift, ill-fitting solutions using Trello, Access, Excel, SharePoint, and other general-purpose tools.

It includes:

- Custom-built projects that don’t easily fit into core or SaaS environments.

- Workflows created by employees without formal development resources or standards.

- A large and growing backlog of wish-list items, uncompleted projects, and hack-a-thon ideas.

- New business requirements outside the scope of existing core solutions.

This last category is important for operational efficiency in finding ways to save time and money; for customer satisfaction in responding quickly to requests; for user experience by giving employees beautiful, engaging, high-quality, and well-supported applications; and for strategic differentiation in responding to new opportunities, channels, and ideas.

Yet regulators now expect organizations to maintain a consistently high level of system maturity across all their solutions, not just the critical ones. That means the “Everything Else” category must have connectivity, resilience, and security at appropriate levels. For organizations accustomed to makeshift solutions, this presents an entirely new challenge.

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“Our IT department doesn’t do that.”

Custom-built software has fallen out of favor.

Successive waves of rules and regulations for privacy/PII, information security, and breach management have increased compliance requirements in ways that have made it difficult to justify smaller projects.

Mission-critical systems and third-party SaaS solutions have mature IT governance processes with application lifecycle management (ALM), continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), and enterprise data management (EDM). Small projects may not easily fit into these frameworks.

In this careful environment, it’s common for IT to focus on outside relationships with vendors, service providers, and partners. When this happens to an extreme degree, IT falls out of practice with the consultative skills needed to create solutions for internal business users.

How does a three-month project, or a three-week project, fit into that type of organization?

Usually, it doesn’t. The answer then becomes: “Our IT department doesn’t do that.”

With the costs of compliance and governance pushed upstream to the business, it becomes hard to make the business case for small-scale custom projects. It’s easy for IT to say “No” when the perceived risks of custom development outweigh the potential operational and strategic benefits.

Rather than create in-house solutions, organizations will select virtually any other approach – even when it’s an imperfect fit.

A common approach is to create only within existing environments using a vendor’s governance and compliance frameworks. The risk here is over-customization: If you extend a solution outside its logical functional boundaries in unintended ways, you may face significant constraints when updating to a new version. Moreover, this approach makes migration to a solution from a different vendor much more difficult and expensive, leading to a lack of flexibility and overreliance on existing vendor relationships.

Another approach is to rely on citizen development, empowering end users to create their own solutions that draw upon their specific knowledge about enterprise business processes. The low-code platforms available for citizen developers are improving, but the risks of design errors are significant without coaching, alignment, and support from IT professionals – who often feel constrained by the idiosyncrasies and limitations of low-code environments.

There’s a better way.

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It’s time to reconsider the role of the IT department as a valued business partner that can deliver custom-built enterprise solutions at a rapid pace.

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Blueprint for an Application Factory

What do you think of when you hear the word “factory”?

We believe that having a factory means that you’re prepared for scalability to meet customer demand. You have the predictability to meet quality standards at a 99.999% reliability level. And because we have a modern factory in mind, it also means you have the flexibility to create precisely what the customer wants.

The Application Factory is all those things – scalability, predictability, and flexibility – working on behalf of the business users within your own organization.

- Scalability: Streamline the process of creating business apps that feature a truly beautiful user experience.

- Predictability: Everything you build works as expected, with compliance and governance as required.

- Flexibility: If you can model it, you can build it. Any size, any domain.

Of course, if you’re looking to create something highly technical, such as real-time embedded systems or specialized control systems, the low-code approach may not be right for you. Not all projects are suited for low-code application platforms, but for those that are, the Application Factory establishes the ideal conditions for a successful implementation.

Here are the three things you need to build an Application Factory within your organization:

1. Solution Creators

2. Enterprise-Grade Low-Code Platform

3. Mission Statement

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1. Solution Creators have cross-functional skills in complementary areas:

- Business analysis: Perform data and process modeling based on deep knowledge of a business domain.

- Functional consulting: Translate models into working software including menus, screens, reports, lists, and dashboards.

- Project management: Communicate expectations with clients, follow Agile development practices, and ensure that you can meet expectations for fast turnaround.

- Programming: Enhance functionality with custom code, if needed, for your “secret sauce”, that 10 percent of capabilities beyond the low-code boundaries that sets your solution apart from competitors.

In earlier generations of building software, you would find different people in each of these roles.

Inside an Application Factory, the same person can do it all. Or a team of two can split the responsibilities. (We also recommend that you call upon a UI/UX expert as a shared resource across projects.)

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2. A next-gen Enterprise-Grade Low-Code Solution turns the Application Factory from concept into reality.

Your objective is to allow Solution Creators to translate customer requirements into business applications with as few barriers as possible.

When selecting a low-code solution for an Application Factory, the core requirement is ease of adoption. Your Solution Creators will be performing a wide range of roles and tasks, and you want them to switch contexts as smoothly as possible. A low-code platform must help them through the entire workflow, from initial consultation to go-live.

You’ll also need an enterprise-grade solution to enforce a standardized approach for compliance, governance, and support, which addresses the primary concern involved with building enterprise apps at a professional level.

The next generation of low-code platforms may surprise you. Although the low-code movement has advanced over the last decade, many of today's leading low-code platforms have become outdated in some important respects. Modern low-code platforms expand the range of possibilities in exciting ways.

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How to Choose a Low-Code Solution for an Application Factory

Here are seven characteristics of a next-gen low-code platform for an Application Factory:

1. Domain-driven design. Go directly from a domain model to executable code without the need for unnecessary documents and diagrams. With domain-driven design, the document is the program.

2. Start with use cases. Instead of building apps starting from CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete), think of verbs that reflect business actions (e.g. Approve/Reject, Transfer/Suspend/Resolve). By focusing on actions that users take within the application, you’ll quickly align actions with roles, permissions, and APIs.

3. Event-Driven Architecture with Open APIs. Whenever something important happens (e.g. “Order Approved”), you’ll need to send notifications and trigger actions in other systems. With an event-driven architecture, you’ll define triggers based on high-level business actions, rather than on low-level field changes (as with earlier generations of low-code platforms). This makes it easier to understand, faster to create solutions, and more accessible for other developers using your Open APIs.

4. Codeless-first AND code-friendly. The codeless-first approach translates domain-driven design, business actions, and events (#1 through #3) directly into working applications that can be easily enhanced with no-code components. Code-friendly gives developers access to established development languages (e.g. JavaScript/Node.js) for creating new code assets to be encapsulated as no-code building blocks for reuse in future applications.

5. Integrated app creation environment. Minimize or eliminate context switching between different environments for UI, coding, source control, database management, and CI/CD pipelines. Doing so enables a small team to stay on track without having to learn and relearn different interfaces.

6. Pixel-perfect apps. Your end-users deserve engaging, beautifully branded web and mobile experiences that resemble their favorite apps. Unleash the creativity of your solution creators by giving them the control to create pixel-perfect customer-facing apps that enhance the user experience, align with the company brand, and convey quality in every aspect.

7. Milliseconds always count. Application performance is not only essential for end users in a final application, but it’s a key perceptual aspect of getting successful projects designed, approved, built, and deployed. Within the context of an Application Factory, there’s no room for making apologies for a slow demo or experiencing noticeable differences between staging and deployment. You’ll want lightning-fast performance with no delays or lags

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The mission statement is an essential component of an Application Factory, defining its objectives, expectations, and success criteria.

Here’s a sample:

* Our objective: To create an Application Factory as a reliable ongoing resource for building flexible and compliant enterprise solutions at a professional level.

* Our expectations: Our core team of business analysts, functional consultants, and programmers will provide the highest quality of consultative support to enterprise stakeholders on custom development projects lasting from three weeks to three months.

* Our promise: We’ll make it easy for our clients in every business unit by centering the conversation around the problems of the business. You can leave the technical stuff to us.

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Our success criteria:

• Speed in meeting business requirements with customized no-code/low-code solutions

• Stakeholder satisfaction in translating business requirements into completed applications

• Reuse to expand the scope of applications to new use cases

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The “Yes” Factory

Ready, Set, Create

The Application Factory gives IT a viable path to deliver custom-designed enterprise-grade solutions on a fast timetable.

An Application Factory can make an enormous difference simply by focusing on valuable business projects that were previously ignored or set aside. Instead of always having to say “no” or putting business units into a long queue for development, a small team of dedicated resources can go a long way to restoring trust in IT as a solution provider.

Through success at solving real business problems, the Application Factory provides a foundation for talent development within the IT department and offers ongoing growth and competitiveness for the entire enterprise.

And when someone in the business asks whether you can create a solution for them, you’ll be ready to answer with a clear and confident “Yes.”

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About DAZZM

DAZZM is a cloud-based, end-to-end managed service platform founded on a codeless-first development model that ensures the investment you make today, generates financial returns tomorrow.

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