How Mendix Enables Fast & Collaborative Application Delivery within Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Model

Far too many business opportunities are lost simply because innovation projects are treated the same way as core enterprise systems. Growing demand and heightened user expectations puts immense pressure on IT leaders to manage and prioritize their application needs. Using Gartner's Pace-Layered Application Strategy in conjunction with the Mendix App Platform, IT can deliver high-impact systems of differentiation and innovation with the speed, agility and collaboration required by the business.

The growth and success of your company depends on its ability to differentiate its offering and innovate in tangible ways that move the needle. In today's technology-driven world, that means developing light-weight, user-friendly applications fast, is a business mandate. Companies are constantly looking to automate complex proprietary processes, connect siloed systems to enable intuitive user experiences, and drive multi-channel interactions with customers, partners and suppliers. The IT teams responsible for managing this demand are stretched to their limits and challenged with finding solutions for new challenges that can't effectively be addressed using old methodologies and tools.

In today's diverse IT environments, one thought becomes overwhelmingly apparent: not all business applications are equal. Some are meant to do the heavy lifting of highly standardized, even regulated processes that are identical from one company to another, won't change for years, and often form the backbone of a company's financial transactions. Other applications, the ones that make your business unique, are dreamt up by an innovative marketing department that needed them yesterday. Both examples show how different applications and their origins can be, but what does this mean for your application development strategy, methodology and tools?

A differentiated and multi-layered approach such as Gartner's "Pace-Layered Application Strategy" allows IT leaders to build a much more effective application development strategy by segmenting business applications by the problems they address, their rate of change, and the distinctiveness of the business capabilities they facilitate. This framework recognizes that applications are fundamentally different based on how they're used by the organization, distinguishing three "pace-layers": Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Innovation.

Looking at existing applications and future development projects in this way raises the question: Why apply the same application delivery model to differentiating and innovative projects as you do maintenance to your systems of record? Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini, makes a perfect analogy: "Too many enterprises are using 'bus and train tools' to build and maintain their 'car and scooter' applications."

A pace-layered application strategy alleviates the conflicting needs of business and IT. According to Gartner, "Business managers and users are looking for modern, easy-to-use applications that can be quickly deployed to solve specific problems. Leadership teams are looking for ways to mitigate risks or take advantage of market opportunities. Meanwhile, the IT organization is typically working toward a strategic goal of standardizing on a limited set of comprehensive application suites to minimize integration issues, maximize security and reduce IT costs."1

Combating these conflicting interests, an organized view of pace-layers helps categorize and prioritize development projects based on each layer's ability to generate business value. For differentiating and innovative applications, IT leaders need to focus on speed of development, their ability to adapt applications to new and ever-changing business requirements, and to enable continuous business collaboration in those projects to ensure successful outcomes.

The Mendix App Platform uniquely sets IT teams up for successful application delivery within a pace-layered model. It enables them to build enterprise-class, multi-channel, and integrated applications in a much quicker, more flexible, and collaborative manner by combining visual, Model Driven Development, 1-Click Deployment, Social Collaboration and Central App Governance in one complete platform. Business and IT teams can collaborate, build, deploy and manage applications instantly and make changes easily. This makes the Mendix App Platform particularly well suited for creating differentiating and innovative applications.

One interesting aspect of this model is that these layers don't exist in a vacuum. For example, ERP extensions are a common need among business units in large enterprises. In this case, a System of Differentiation is built on top of a System of Record in order to enable a particular business process or provide a business unit with some functionality not supported by the ERP system. Applications may move up or down through pace-layers as they become more engrained in the organization's operating procedures. Truly innovative applications are destined to move down as IT teams create repeatable processes for maintaining them and business units become dependent on them.

Take the Critical Path for Business Innovation

In today's technology-driven world, custom applications unique to your company are the cornerstone of business innovation. The stakes are high – missed market opportunities, lack of innovation, competitive threats along with high cost – are all too common. The vision of the pace-layered application strategy combined with the development power of the Mendix App Platform gives IT teams an innovative edge to quickly seize new business opportunities, significantly reduce time-to-market and deliver the applications that businesses need in a highly efficient and flexible way. The Mendix App Platform ushers in a new era in rapid application development – one designed to help your organization grow.

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