As customer expectations and business models evolve with AI, the 2024 Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends will help your organization build and protect itself while generating value.
Download the eBook to explore:
Application leaders drive digital transformation, create innovation opportunities within their teams, and enable business units to improve productivity and customer experience. But the demand for business resilience requires more. Application leaders need to create responsive agile applications, effective application portfolio management and better IT-Business collaboration.
Being aware of changes in the application landscape is no longer enough to stay ahead of business and technology trends; application leaders need to drive change to support an effective, dynamic application environment.
As product centricity moves deeper into organizations, the role of the application manager requires an evolution to meet the new delivery style. It’s critical to redefine what role the current application leader will play, where they will work and how they must lead in the age of digital transformation.
Application leaders and their teams face intense budget scrutiny. Over the last two years, only 53% of business cases for new projects were approved. Explore how to quantify the value of enterprise applications to secure funding and approval.
IT Score for Applications is a strategic planning tool for the head of applications and the application leadership team that helps you unlock the path to improving activities in your function.
Generative AI has revealed applications’ potential to operate intelligently, which has created the expectation for intelligent applications. Learn the foundational changes affecting applications and the implications.
Three themes that emerged in the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024 and how businesses can move beyond experimentation with what AI could be used for, to a comprehensive implementation plan that ultimately creates enterprise value.
Watch this webinar where a Gartner expert explores strategic trends in application platforms and architecture to meet the increasing demand for innovation, agility, and scale.
An enterprise applications strategy guides the most important application roadmap and architecture decisions, informed by value stream models that closely align to business objectives. An application strategy includes the guiding principles and future roadmap for evolving the application portfolio, processes and organization. This is done in order to meet the strategic needs of the operational, customer and employee experience objectives, while minimizing the cost of building and maintaining the portfolio.
Enterprise application leaders must create an application strategy that aligns to business outcomes, particularly during times of economic headwinds. To meet these objectives, application leaders require clear metrics to track progress and articulate the value of enterprise application investments.
Gartner estimates that IT leaders who successfully communicate their organizations’ business value will maintain 60% higher funding levels than their market peers. Enterprise application leaders often try to set their strategy without fully understanding business priorities. All application organizations need an application strategy to ensure the most important work gets done and the “nice to haves” or limited-value work are tackled last.
Enterprise Application Leader refers to the leadership role that has the primary enterprise accountability for at least one major technology portfolio within a business. This means that they own the strategy, selection, implementation, and operational considerations for that portfolio of applications. An application, in this context, is a commercial software package that automates a discrete set of internal business processes.
The enterprise application leader is not necessarily an IT-only role. Gartner clients report this role in business, IT and matrixed centers of excellence. In a recent Gartner survey, 56% of application leaders stated that they worked in a matrix environment where they report to both an IT executive and a business leader. One way to simplify and scale application ownership is to designate a “domain” chairperson and governance team responsible for a “cluster” of applications sharing a common set of demand-side stakeholders.
The domain grouping ideally should be based on business function or capability (e.g., a cluster of finance, HR and procurement applications). This approach may help split the entire application portfolio into six to eight domains with the chairperson acting as the effective “application leader” for each. In choosing this route, be sure that each domain includes applications from all pace layers — systems of record, differentiation and innovation, because each evolves at different rates.
Application Leaders are responsible for application fitness through the entire lifecycle — including all capital and operating expenditures. Critical to this is ensuring the participation of all legitimate stakeholders in both strategy and evaluation of application options. This individual must coordinate with solution architects, business analysts and PPM organizations regularly to formulate application-related recommendations for management decisioning. As a result, the key skills and competencies of strong demand-side application owners include conflict management, proven ability to moderate a range of issues and success at forging effective relationships across diverse teams.
Organizations are planning for a more volatile future that demands an increasingly flexible Enterprise Applications strategy — whether in a service or product-centric business environment. Enterprises need agility from their applications to respond quickly to customer needs and be able to transform their business as part of a composable applications strategy. To deliver on this transformation, organizations need applications that can be readily assembled, reassembled and extended. IT and professional developers are not the only drivers of technological innovations. Business technologists, such as citizen developers and citizen data scientists, deliver business automation through a variety of technologies.
Application delivery is the practices and processes for developing and deploying applications within an enterprise applications portfolio. This includes DevOps, agile delivery, and product management practices.
New application leaders must create a course of action, make and qualify connections, and establish a personal management style. Gartner has the research that application managers can use to reinforce their role, prepare for the future and improve their enterprise application architecture.
Gather alongside your peers in Las Vegas to gain insight on emerging trends, receive one-on-one guidance from a Gartner expert and create a strategy to tackle your priorities head-on.
Application leaders must transform their development and platform strategies to compete with top performers. Gartner can help you identify and adopt the right strategies to accelerate and scale your digital business ambitions.
