IT Industry is Shifting to New Era, Not Just the Cloud…
When I was high school student, I’ve built a development platform to create CAI software. In my twenties, I’ve created a Java like programming language to build computer telephony applications before Java was born. In my nearly 12 years at Microsoft, I was fortunate to be able to join development of SharePoint product, which could be considered as a kind of citizen developer platform to allow end users to create any kinds of lists by themselves for daily business operation, from the early stage till SharePoint 2013, and now SharePoint has been used widely by 200,000 companies around world. Today, the kintone (kintone.com), which has been built at my current company and has grown rapidly to 4,000+ customers worldwide within last 3 years, is the simplest business application platform upon my past nearly 30 years platform experience.
Take a step back, today, the IT industry has huge “vendor-win and customer-lose” problem. IT vendor spends huge amount of budget to do business analysis of customer’s business operation process and huge amount of time to implement complex solution, but final delivered solution still can’t meet customer particularly the field level operation’s expectation. After launch of applications, customer can’t afford additional budget to change the applications and have to use those applications passively and painfully everyday.
On the other hand, employees in line of business divisions try to use some other vertical cloud services as work around solution without IT approval, which is called as “Shadow IT” issue by Gartner, recently.
The cause of those problems are there is no platform yet today for either vendors or end users to build and change business applications in efficient way. Most of applications need to be built by Java or C++, which only professional developers can handle with.
To resolve those problems, we proposed an new concept called “Fast System”, which
(1) Firstly, allow end users to build their own business applications with drag-and-drop without coding. From the CEO perspective, this will not only leverage employees’ intelligence to enhance their daily business operation productivity by themselves, but also stimulate employees’ motivation to enhance the productivity by themselves. For IT department, it’s a secure and managed but still flexible application platform for line of business users to build their own applications, which will build win-win relationship between IT and line of business users.
(2) Secondly, as a vendor, with such a fast drag-and-drop application builder, instead of spending huge amount of time to analyze customer’s business operation and communicating with customers by back and forth tons of presentation and documents, vendor can build prototype quickly, discuss with customer with the prototype, and change the prototype (of real screens) on site with customers. This will not only reduce the business analysis cost, shorten sales leading time, but also build more trust relationship with customers, for customer to launch application even beta version in a quick pace. No one in the world is genius to understand specific customer business perfectly. Due to limited cost of quick launch of application, vendor can continue work with customers to enhance applications upon the requests from line of business users or business demand change, since the cost of changing application is also lower than today’s legacy application development platforms. This is a “win-win” situation between vendors and customers.
Basically, the essential part of above concept is let end users to enhance their productivity by themselves, for the part that end users can’t do by themselves, the vendors or IT will help to quickly build and enhance applications with end users in a continuous agile way. Such hybrid collaboration between end users and vendors is the most efficient way to build and change applications quickly for business.
One of the platforms today that achieves above two points of the concept is “kintone”, though we are still on the way.
Upon recent innovation of global vendors such as Microsoft and Salesforce, forecast from major IT research companies, and discussion through our partners and customers, the whole enterprise IT industry started to shift onto our “Fast System” concept that we have been approaching 4 years ago. It’s good sign and direction for us:)
The future of business application platform will be innovated further to provide much richer interface, and more intelligence, and there are still much rooms to enhance to ease customers and vendors to build business applications. We will continue lead ahead to disrupt legacy IT industry, to be able to provide much more innovative concept and more convenient platform to our customers and vendors. Stay tuned.
